Traffic has always been and will forever be a damper in the mornings. However, Saratoga High does not efficiently deal with the traffic flow to ensure that parents and students alike can move freely. We are either biking and walking through the parking lot avoiding life-threatening cars, or we are the ones sitting inside of them.

Although the school is aware of the traffic and has taken measures such as re-working the traffic flow in the front lot, adding the fence and traffic patrols and occasionally getting help from the sheriff’s deputies, these methods have not met with much success. There is just too much traffic to control, which leads to students taking unnecessary, and sometimes illegal measures to get to school on time.

The traffic has become so painstaking that in order to be on time, some students turn into isolated streets such as Lexington Court and Cam Rico to meander their way around the major streets. Plenty of parents drop off their children at streets close to the high school, and let them walk, usually in the midst of heavy and dangerous traffic. Ironically, walking is much faster than driving with the traffic flow.

Those two common practices may seem commonplace, but there are also extreme measures parents and students resort to. Parents frequently drop off their children in student parking lots, which endangers the lives of bikers and students who cross the lot. Also, some students avoid the back parking lot by hopping off their parents’ cars driving on Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road. These methods signify how outrageous the school traffic because of how lawless they are.

The school has made many regulations for years, but they have availed. Perhaps students are in dire need of parent cars being fined and prohibited for stepping into student parking lots. Fines against parents trespassing the student parking lot would deter them from going there. This provides more space for the upperclassmen to maneuver their way through the lot, and also decreases the dangers of students and bikers passing through the parking lots.

Because the faculty parks in the back parking lot, it should be faculty only for the convenience of staff members. This would decease the traffic clogging the intersection between Reid Lane and Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road, which is the entrance of the back parking lot, making commute easier in the morning for teachers. If these two solutions were both implemented, then the traffic issue could improve.

The school’s traffic has reached a hazardous point, and the administration needs to look into a solution to put a final end this pressing matter.