By Manuel Siguenza ’12
THE ROUNDUP
Let’s face it, Fridays are the worst days to leave right after school.
Traffic is a mess and it takes longer than 20 minutes to get out of the parking lots at Brophy, especially the south one.
What has caused these traffic clogs that everyone dreads? The problem lies a new blockage between the north and south parking lots.
According to Brophy Dean Mr. Patrick Higgins, this blockage was created in response to Water Day this year for the freshmen. He wanted to slow down traffic for this event specifically so that no one getting on the buses to go to Brophy’s sports campus would be in any danger.
After this event, Mr. Higgins wanted to continue having the blockage to prevent accidents.
He intentionally wants traffic to be slower so that people are aware of their surroundings while driving on campus.
On top of this, he said this will decrease the number of traffic jams on Brophy’s campus.
After observing the traffic flow with him on a Thursday, I noticed that the traffic jams tend to vanish after about 10 minutes.
In all honesty, this is not a long time. People can handle being in the parking lot for 10 minutes waiting to exit the premises.
However, I recall trying to leave school on a Friday and waiting for over half an hour to leave. This instance brought frustration, seeing as how I had to run errands that day.
In addition to the slow progress in the parking lot, people were rude and unwilling to let their neighbor go by.
Rather than being men for others as we have been taught to be, we have become more aggressive and gone into survival mode in the parking lot.
Though I fully respect and understand Mr. Higgins’s reasoning and his want to make the Brophy community safer, I feel there are better ways to prevent traffic problems.
Granted, traffic should be slower in a school environment.
But at the same time it should not affect students’ busy schedules.
Rather than create a blockage, having someone direct the traffic could possibly be a better solution to the problem of traffic that flows too slowly.
Nothing is wrong with slow traffic, but there is a problem with traffic that does not flow quickly enough for everyone to get where they need to in a timely manner.
And there is also a problem if the values of the school are not displayed in the way we exit the school.
This new blockage will most likely stay in place for the rest of the year and may stay for a few years. All we can do now is learn to cope with it and learn to avoid the traffic jams in the near future.
