It’s 8:55 on Friday morning, but it from the time I get to school, it takes me five frustratingly long minutes to find parking. I finally get a spot on Sierra Avenue, and my brother bolts from the car, walking faster than I can run, but getting to class still takes him five and a half minutes.

We need more parking for students. I understand that Piedmont it a small city and that parking has always been an issue, but recent changes have aggravated the problem. Teacher parking at the middle school decreased when the LearnScape Lunch Park replaced spots down by the courts and when the lot behind the gym closed for portables. These teachers, with much grumbling (at least from the one I live with), have started parking on the street instead, occupying more than just the Permit A spots and forcing students to hike in.

Most of the street spaces near the high school are Permit A, Resident or City Employee. Unless you are both 20 minutes early and gutsy enough to parallel park on Magnolia’s steep curve, the closest available parking is several long blocks away, and even then, it is no piece of cake. Guilford, the street above the park, is far too narrow for all of the parked student cars, making entering and exiting quite an ordeal.

Although I agree that students could avoid the parking problem by driving less, this is unreasonably impractical. Most students do not live close enough to walk to school, and few students are legally allowed to carpool due to the restrictions on new drivers. Our 9:10 start time on Tuesdays and Fridays is a godsend, but it does make getting a ride from a parent tricky.

I know that a proper parking lot will not fit in “downtown” Piedmont, but I have a few ideas to make mornings less stressful and help students get to class on time. Firstly, the 2-hour zones on Highland should be real parking for students. Secondly, students should be allowed to park in empty resident spaces because they will be gone long before the residents return. Thirdly,  the community center lot should have fewer 15-minute loading zones.

It used to be the early bird’s worm, but the community center lot has become increasingly inhospitable to the students. Half of the spots are now 15-minute parking, and 8 of them stood empty at 8:36, prime drop-off time for the preschool parents who use the lot. Delegating our precious parking as 15-minute spots contradicts common sense. Why waste our precious resource? Students need to park while they are at school.

To maximize parking, we should allow teachers to park by the portables in the lot behind the gym, where there is still plenty of space. A more radical solution would be making Vista one way to provide perpendicular spots along the tennis courts like those on Bonita. Although it requires some new paint, it’s an easier and better solution than ripping out the grass at Piedmont Park and replacing it with a parking lot like my friend once suggested.

The lack of parking for high school students is a constant source of frustration, creating morning traffic jams and tardy slips, but adding even changing even ten green zones into real parking would help immensely.