Parking lot traffic continues to cause problems

We see it every week, cars lined bumper to bumper as far as the eye can see. Every Wednesday and every lunch, a torrent of students’ cars are stuck behind one another waiting to leave the parking lot through a single exit that is also an entrance for parents picking up their children. 

The parking lot is bad enough on its own, but add to the fact that it’s on an already busy road with the hospital across the street. Imagine if an ambulance had to get through during one of the daily parking lot traffic jams.

 Past all the annoyances of students being late for work, and parents taking a long time to pick up their kids, the current parking lot layout is unsafe.

In fact, way back in January, 2016 the Red’N’Green highlighted this issue in an opinion piece about how opening the back gates would reduce the traffic on Memorial Drive. The opinion piece also highlighted how dangerous the bumper to bumper to bumper traffic is during the winter.

All of these issues would be fixed with one simple solution, open up the back gate, and allow students to exit through both the student exit we have now, and the bus/teacher parking lot exit.Understandably, the school may not want to open up the possibility of students blocking busses from leaving, but the busses leave school later than students anyway. 

Even if the school is unwilling to open up the second exit from the student lot, the least they could do is to have a school resource officer direct traffic, to prevent accidents while leaving the lot, and to ensure proper traffic flow.

 The presence of a school resource officer/police officer, would also deter students from speeding, or driving unsafely and make the parking lot a generally safer and more efficient place. We already have faculty and occasionally officer Bennett supervising the buses, why not have someone supervise the student lot too.

 Obviously it is a bit late in the school year for the administration to do this now; however, next year all students will be released at the same time, meaning that everyone will be trying to leave all at once. So it is time for the administration to consider some ways to ease the chaos that is the student parking lot.