Photo courtesy of junior Hudson Jones.

  Like all teenage drivers, San Luis Obispo High School students deal with each other’s terrible driving. However, inexperience doesn’t account for the problems with student parking.

  SLOHS has awful parking options that can’t be avoided.

  “A lot of people park super close to me. It’s easy for cars to hit you because you’re close to other cars,” said senior Sammy Reichmuth.

  The student parking lot’s risk is due to bottlenecks. There are two two-way entrances to the parking lot. Turn lanes allow drivers to easily park in the lot, and the primary entrance goes straight down the middle of the lot. Branches off of the primary entrance hold all of the parking space.

  The critical flaw in the design of the parking lot is the merging exiting traffic. There is zero assistance in exiting the parking wings. Parents picking up their children exit through the middle of the parking lot. Exiting the lot from the wings necessitates merging with the other two streams of cars.

  The only traffic signs that exist in the lot are at each exit. Every single exiting car has to come to a stop and yield to oncoming traffic. Traffic from the crosswalks and stop lights can result in cars backing up, which reduces visibility.

  Parking on San Luis Drive can be worse than parking in the lot. 

  “One time I was thinking about parking across the street so I don’t have to get out of [the parking lot], but I was too lazy so I didn’t,” said Reichmuth. 

  Parking down the street ensures safe and consistent return times, but the return time is generally worse than using the parking lot.

   Using the streets on the hill as parking proves to be dangerous. An anonymous junior at SLOHS claims that parking in the District Office parking lot led to their car being vandalized. They had “Coke thrown on all over the car”, “Doritos thrown on top of the AC vent”, and “a [used] tampon shoved behind the mirror”. 

  It could be argued that employing a strategy could improve parking. Trying to participate in afterschool activities when possible mitigates high traffic. Parking in specific spaces aids in avoiding merging traffic.

  All logistical advantages given by strategies become redundant if everyone follows the same strategy. All good parking spots will be taken, and simultaneously leaving with others creates traffic.

  The parking at SLOHS is unavoidably bad. It takes valuable time out of every morning and every evening. If it weren’t for the sprawling suburbs surrounding SLOHS, other modes of transportation would become much more feasible.