CHS students park in one of three places throughout the school day: Old Topanga Canyon Road, Mullholand Highway or the Senior Lot. To park in the Senior Lot, CHS seniors must purchase a parking spot and display their parking pass. While the admin has provided a way for seniors to report cars parking in their assigned spots when they arrive, this system does nothing to limit cars without passes parking there for afternoon pickup.
Leaving the Senior Lot is hectic enough without the addition of unpermitted cars picking up students. CHS needs to create some sort of system to stop parents and other individuals from picking up students by parking in open spots in the Senior Lot.
There are a variety of ways to solve this issue, including closing half of the gate by Old Topanga Canyon Road in the Senior Lot so that cars can only exit, not enter and/or having a guard who only allows cars with displayed passes to turn into the Senior Lot.
However, extra cars in the Senior Lot are not the only problem plaguing afternoon pickup at CHS, even with the staggered pickup times created by the Off-Campus Pass.
The current system (shown below) has the pickup spot located along the right curb across from the PAEC with those cars going down to the gate by Old Topanga Canyon Road to exit, creating even more congestion at the exit of the Senior Lot. While many avoid this traffic by picking up on the street outside of campus, there is still an excessive number of cars trying to make their way through the Senior Lot.
To combat this issue, CHS admin should change the way cars exit after picking up students by changing the Pickup location.
This solution would be to move the Pickup spot to the front of the school along the admin buildings, with cars entering from either the side or front gate and exiting out the front gate instead of going through the Senior Lot. Those cars entering from the front gate instead of the side gate would go through the last row of the Staff Lot to turn left in order to get to the Pickup/Dropoff spot. The rest of the Staff Lot would still be coned off to stop cars from parking there, but the front of the school would be accessible for Pickup/Dropoff. The buses that previously parked there would Pickup/Dropoff where the cars did with the current system, meaning only a single bus goes through the Senior Lot.
Regardless of how the issue is tackled, CHS admin needs to do something to help with the traffic in the Senior Lot.
