Got the school parking lot bottle neck blues?

Every school day, traffic piles up along Highway 98 while hundreds of cars wait to enter the school parking lot.

In a perfect world, all students would ride the bus to school or walk. However, this is not a perfect world, and a large number of students arrive by car to the three schools in on Gulf Breeze Parkway.

Last week, I again witnessed one of the problems that causes backup on Highway 98 during school drop off hours, and that is the bottleneck at the egress point from Gulf Breeze Elementary and Gulf Breeze Middle.

There are two ways to enter the joint parking lot, but only one way out, trapping all the vehicles until the light changes, preventing cars on Highway 98 from entering the full lot, even when the light is still green. Therefore, traffic backs up on Highway 98.

This bottleneck keeps cars stacked up on Highway 98 waiting for the parking lot to empty. If an additional egress point were added, eastbound cars could leave the parking lot and alleviate at least part of the bottleneck and allow more cars to enter the parking lot from Highway 98.

However, in the current design, traffic between the two schools can only flow one way, from the elementary school to the middle school. If a vehicle needs to travel back to the elementary school, it must go back onto Highway 98 and make a loop, again waiting for the light to change, cars to leave, etc.

Same thing happens for those who need to go to both the Middle School and the High School. Asidewalk prevents cars from traveling between the schools, so cars must exit the Middle School parking lot, get back on Highway 98 and then enter the high school parking lot.

This week is spring break for our students, and you probably noticed that traffic was flowing along at a brisk pace. We can take steps to make every day better, if traffic flow is improved at the three schools in the City of Gulf Breeze.