Staff Editorial

In simple language, Cal High’s back parking lot is a crazy, unorganized mess.

Something needs to be done to resolve this daily headache for students.

Since the recent completion of the solar panel carports in the back parking lot, there has been added confusion to what has been a miserable situation for years.

Last year, there was a clear exit route onto Broadmoor Drive. Sure, it wasn’t quick to exit by any stretch of the imagination, but at least it was easier to understand how to get out.

In the new lot, all the new curbs force students to take many different paths to the exit, creating many spots in which two lanes are forced into the one exit route.

Previously, this was not as big a problem.

Recently, a Californian editor timed his exit from the back of the lot to Broadmoor Drive, and clocked it at around 30 minutes. From the middle of the lot to Broadmoor, it took 20 minutes. The time it takes to exit seems to be getting worse each year.

This month, administrators tried to address this problem by having campus supervisor Tim Ford stand by the band room, where the single exit lane branches into two lanes, and direct drivers into either the left or right lanes.

Students who were directed into the left lane were forced to turn left on Broadmoor or continue straight to Millbridge. Students in the right lane were forced to go right.

Many students felt this helped very little because it still took about the same time to exit the lot, and some students were forced to head out of the lot in a direction away from their destination.

Also, there are always people coming into the parking lot trying to turn left to get to the baseball field or parking lot behind the main building, which slows down the exit process.

If the school was serious about solving this problem, it should prevent drivers from entering the back lot between 2:55 and 3:15, the peak time when students are trying to exit.

By doing this, students could be directed into three lanes starting near the band room, allowing them to head left, straight or right out of the lot and exit the lot more quickly.

But the problem is not just with the lot itself. There are also many student drivers who are just flat out rude.

If drivers were more courteous to each other , exiting would move more quickly. When students used to go one-by-one, the line moved at an even pace. That’s not the case now. The misconception of cutting lines to get ahead proves to be inefficient.

Exiting the lot has become some sort of an aggressive competition. If students and administrators coordinated and worked together to create plan, we can perhaps lessen the time to get out of the lot.