As junior Peyton Elliot turns into the parking garage entrance, slowly approaching her fate, she drives, hoping that her RFID tag will be scanned and a line of cars won’t grow behind her. As her tag fails to scan she is forced to find a new place to park, and be late to class.
At Bowie High School, students have faced ongoing issues with campus parking options, and the parking reliability. Bowie offers three different purchasable parking options for students, the parking garage, A-lot, and Bethany Church lot. Additionally, students can park on Wolf Trap Drive, or Norman Trail for free.
“Anytime a person who doesn’t have a parking permit asks me where they can park I tell them they can purchase one of the three different lots, or park on Wolf Trap Drive,” campus safety monitor Andrew Padget said. “For free options, I can’t tell students where they can and cannot go, there are both sides of Wolftrap Drive and that’s it.”
While A-lot and Bethany have some complaints, students have encountered many continuous issues with the parking garage. These include, the garage failing to open, excessive traffic, and reckless driving.
“I’ve not been able to get into the garage, multiple times,” Elliot said. “I’ve had to reverse and let somebody else go, or have someone else open with their pass and I’ve had to gun through behind them.”
Students with a Texas Toll Tag on their vehicle are more likely to experience malfunctions with the entry system. If the garage system detects the toll tag first, it assumes the car is attempting to enter illegally, causing the system to shut the student out.
“If you have a Texas toll tag on your car, you have a 50/50 chance that the gate is going to work,” Padget said. “There are two problems that cause the student to be shut out. One of them I can fix, and the other one all I can do is advise.”
According to the Bowie campus safety monitor, the other cause of the garage not opening for students stems from students driving too close behind one another. If the garage entry system senses two different scans in the same session, It interprets this as an attempt to bypass the system, locking students out.
“For that issue, all I can do is advise them to stay on the outside, and wait till the car in front starts to turn into the garage,” Padget said. “If you turn into the garage while that car is still there, that’s when it’ll pick up two signals.”
The gate issue affects not only the students involved but also surrounding drivers. Students may often end up behind someone who is unable to enter the garage. If the driver doesn’t back up promptly, it causes students to be stuck behind them and affects everyone involved.
“It’s happened a few times that I’ve been stuck behind people who couldn’t get in,” junior Daniel Sinton said. “The driver didn’t get out of the way for anyone else so we were all stuck behind them, I felt bad for them, and I felt bad for everyone else that was going to be late for class.”
In addition, students have spoken up about the dangerous driving habits of drivers in the parking garage. With students driving at high speeds and their rush to leave the building, junior Isaias Sanchez explains that these habits create a dangerous environment in the garage.
“People aren’t driving appropriately,” Sanchez said. “People are impatient, they are doing anything to leave school faster, in which they become careless and put pedestrians at risk.”
The parking garage serves a large number of drivers, and as a result, traffic is an issue. Drivers from the garage are instructed to turn onto Wolftrap Dr. a traffic hot-spot for students, faculty, and parents.
“I think the biggest issue besides the RFID tags, is definitely the traffic,” Sanchez said. “I think they could limit traffic by making a right turn lane onto Wolftrap Dr. so the people turning right don’t have to wait for all the people turning left.”
These consistent issues have caused students to seek out different parking options. With A-lot being in high demand, Sanchez turned to Bethany Lutheran Church parking as a more reliable option.
“I had a parking garage pass but I started to park in the church parking lot because my RFID tag never worked,” Sanchez said. “The gate didn’t open whenever I went, no matter how many times I tried so I just stopped.”
While alternative parking options seem like the solution for students, they come with their own set of challenges. During dismissal, parents often park at Bethany Church to pick up students. However, they park on the road illegally causing extensive traffic and increasing the risk of accidents
“Parents should just go to the front of the school like they’re instructed to,” Sanchez said. “They park on the right side of the street and they slow me down, it would take me 15 minutes just to get past them, and I didn’t know if they were going or just waiting so I had to wait to go around them and it would hold everybody up.”
