There’s no doubt that the parking controversy has been a big topic amongst underclassmen. Juniors aren’t as concerned, as they have priority to both the school parking lot and the church parking lot next year. So most of the underclassmen, myself included, are upset that we will have to park over a mile away from Bowie.

Even though Bowie is at least trying to make sure everyone can have a parking space, this whole situation is going to be awful for everyone involved.

Because student drivers will be parking so far away, there will be shuttles running between Bowie and Westoak Woods Baptist Church.

This system is most likely going to be a bus because so many students will be needing to get to and from their cars all at the same time. Think of the traffic that we’re going to have to sit through just to get to the parking lot from the number of students involved. Ironically, it makes more sense to take the bus to school rather than driving to school, parking far away, and then taking a shuttle.

What happens to the people who have to leave school later because of after school activities? The shuttles probably won’t be running by the end of school, so these students will have to walk all the way to their cars.

It’s not as simple as them parking closer to Bowie before school — the traffic and the wait time for the shuttles will most likely take much longer than anticipated, making them late to their activity. Bowie is trying to avoid this by scheduling the shuttles to run from 6:30 am to 10 pm to make sure that no one has to walk to get to their cars.

To get one of these valuable spaces, students will have to apply to park at the Bethany Lutheran Church across the street. The application will be based on GPA, extracurriculars, class rank, and attendance. While I believe that this application process seems fair, I also think it will lead to a lot more unhealthy and unnecessary student competition.

Since pretty much all of the current sophomores want to be able to park close by, everyone is going to start trying to one up one another which will lead to an unhealthy environment at school.

Once the parking garage is built, many new drivers will all be leaving school at the same time. This will most likely lead to multiple crashes, which will then take everyone else even longer to get out.

Although the parking garage sounds like a good idea, it will most likely lead to more traffic and may just make our current parking situation worse. In addition to the garage, Bowie is adding another left turn lane onto Slaughter Lane. This will hopefully decrease the amount of waiting time to turn left by a landslide, which will benefit everyone going that way.

Overall, Bowie is trying its hardest to make sure everyone can park as close as possible, however the steps to reach that goal are going to be long and simply terrible for people who want to drive to school next year.