A Times Editorial

Yielding to school traffic

Anyone who regularly picks up a child at a Pinellas County school following afternoon dismissal knows it is a miracle each day that no one is hurt or killed in a traffic accident near the school.

Traffic is bad enough at elementary and middle schools, where parents -- some of them in a hurry because they are on brief breaks from work -- descend on schools from all directions.

They double park or jockey for parking space along street right-of-ways, barely out of traffic lanes. They jam school driveways, frustrating drivers behind them who can't move forward to pick up a waiting child. They ignore traffic signs, pull their cars into bus-only lanes and race through yellow lights -- or even red ones -- to get in or out of a school a little more quickly.

Add high school-age drivers, and the situation gets really scary. When Pinellas high schools let out in the afternoons, there is a no-holds-barred race for the parking lot and then the streets. Inexperienced student drivers in a hurry to make it to work, to the beach or just to escape peel out of parking lots and take off, fiddling with their radios, waving to friends or even changing into work uniforms while behind the wheel.

This dangerous situation often is exacerbated by poor campus traffic patterns, inadequate stacking lanes and pavement markings on streets around schools, and virtually nonexistent law enforcement at some schools. These conditions may be allowed to exist for years until parent pressure, a change in principals or an unfortunate accident leads to improvements.

People who routinely experience the traffic problems around Pinellas schools in the afternoons may often wonder: Why isn't anybody in authority noticing this mess?

For too long, no one did, but that may be changing.

The county Metropolitan Planning Organization has a school safety task force that is studying traffic patterns around schools and working on solutions. Chairwoman Susan Latvala, who is a Pinellas County commissioner, said in a Times story last week that she has long been bothered by the lack of coordination between the school district and the county on transportation issues, especially around new schools.

The task force has been working quietly since it was created in 1999 to tackle a traffic-related controversy at the new McMullen-Booth Elementary School in Clearwater. Parents, teachers and students, forced to cross six-lane McMullen-Booth Road, had lobbied hard for a traffic light to ease the crossing. But traffic studies, conducted properly by traffic engineers, found that neither the daily volume of traffic nor the number of accidents met the official warrants for a light.

The task force advocated a new "warrant" -- safety -- and recommended that the light be installed anyway. The MPO agreed.

That kind of common-sense approach is what is needed to address the traffic issues around the county's dozens of schools, many of them on major thoroughfares already crammed with vehicles. Traditional traffic engineering studies don't always tell the full story of what is going on around schools: Traffic volumes have huge spikes, but for as little as 15 or 20 minutes around the close of the school day; pedestrians and bicyclists as young as 5 are walking and riding through vehicle traffic; and traffic patterns at older schools have not been updated to consider today's higher traffic volumes and increased numbers of student drivers.

The Pinellas County school district and local law enforcement agencies need to do a better job of addressing the traffic environment and enforcement issues around schools. And the MPO and its school safety task force can make a valuable contribution to the study of how to make schools safer places for drivers.

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