When seniors present their Urban Plan project to a mock city council, every aspect of their plan is questioned, from how each business fits their vision to the impact of shadows. If a group of students included a high school with no long-term parking for students and staff, they would fail. Our current city government has effectively done just that.Â
As an editorial board, we believe the recent changes to parking in Piedmont, including converting 30 spaces to two-hour short-term parking and the increased enforcement of current short-term parking, directly negatively affect students and staff and must be reversed. The lack of parking for PHS, MHS, and PMS is already a well-known issue, and the city’s decision to make that problem significantly worse is unacceptable.
This expansion of short-term parking will increase student tardiness due to greater difficulty finding parking and students having to park farther from campus. It will also lead to more tardies in other periods due to students attempting to avoid tickets by moving their cars in our short passing periods. This is coupled with a growing number of expensive parking tickets that have already begun to rack up. This causes direct disruption to instruction and makes students’ lives more difficult.
Teachers and staff are also greatly impacted by these changes. There will now only be seven available staff parking spots that are not short-term. With staff members at PHS alone, this lack of parking is egregious. As a community that prides itself on our schools and great teachers, we must at the very least make our schools accessible to those staff members. Another element of the urban plan project is to take into account the needs and grievances of all members of the community and to prioritize the most important groups; clearly, this was not done in this decision.
While the opening of the new community pool is extremely exciting and will require increased parking, this does not justify the decision. The pool should see much lower attendance rates during school hours, and it is not fair to students and teachers to prioritize a small number of visitors on weekdays. Additionally, the two-hour parking limit for the pool does not make sense for its purpose. Swim and Water Polo practices are two hours long. To allow athletes to arrive on time, change before and after practice, remove equipment from the pool, and walk to and from their cars, the two-hour parking limit is simply not long enough. Additionally, pool employees cannot park nearby for their shifts, further emphasizing that these changes do not make the pool more accessible or helpful to our community.
This decision also reflects a pattern of a lack of input the city takes from our students and teachers in the community. While it is true that the city conducted a survey of over 500 Piedmont residents, according to Piedmont Exedra, there is more to outreach and opinion-getting than a broad survey. A concerning number of PHS students were unaware of this change, and many only learned about it after discovering a $70 ticket in their windshield. Community members, in general, do not accurately represent those most affected by the changes being made. Within days, a student-led petition was started to reverse this decision, collecting 388 signatures as of April 21.
When changing the urban plan of our community, the city should be held to much higher standards than our high school seniors doing a school project. These changes to parking ignore the true needs of our community and fail to achieve the goals they were intended to. They must be reversed.