Our project looks to answer the question of how to improve our school’s street flow because at entrance/exit times, for around 5-15 minutes, the traffic moves very slowly. We wanted to find out why this happen and what can we do.
The ideas
We started by asking ourselves, ‘What are the mobility problems at our school?’ For five to ten minutes before entrance time and five to fifteen minutes at dismissal, the traffic flow is very slow, and sometimes there are traffic jams. So, what causes this? By our personal experiences and what we see every day, we deducted that there are two causes to this, double parking and perpendicular roads.
The issue with double parking is that parents want to leave/pick up their children at the entrance, so they all try to park as near to the entrance as they can, even double parking next to an empty space; when they tend to double park it leaves only one way for cars to move, and when they sometimes triple park, it stops the traffic completely.
The problem with perpendicular roads is that the street our school is on, Moreno, has three perpendicular streets that are two-way, ‘Wolfang Amadeus Mozart’, ‘Ludvig van Beethoven’ and ‘Las Higueritas’, and they are not wide enough to be two-way streets, so when there is too much traffic people that are trying to enter, let’s say, Beethoven, are met with the enormous line of people coming to pick their kids from Moreno, thus causing a traffic jam.
The initiatives
We asked ourselves, ‘What can we do about these problems?’ We decided to tackle these two issues separately; first, we did some polls and we discussed the issue of double parking with some parents that pick up students, students themselves, and teachers.
The polls show that a majority double park, some would rather not, but they feel like they have no other option. They all know that by double parking they are making the traffic even slower, and some feel that if they don’t do it someone else will. Also, we concluded that there is a bad view of people that double park.
Therefore, the answer to the problem would be to raise awareness of the students and parents by doing an awareness campaign. We can help this problem by making students realize that they don’t have to be picked up at the front of the school, and that they can walk a couple of blocks in order to help with this issue.
And, regarding the problem of the perpendicular streets, the answer would be to talk to the municipality and make them think about this issue. We suggest that the solution would be to turn all of these streets into one-way streets.
Once this done, the traffic flow at our school will change for the better, people will be less stressed, and they won’t waste time.
