Mountain View High School students can keep parking their cars on Truman and Bryant avenues, at least for now.
The two streets, which border the high school, used to have “No Parking” signs on the sides facing the school, but those signs were taken down during construction of the new Alta Vista campus. Now that work is done, but on Monday night, the Mountain View-Los Altos Board of Trustees voted to keep the signs down.
The move upset a group of neighbors who spoke out at the meeting, saying they feel that students’ driving habits create potentially dangerous traffic congestion around their homes, and that leaving the signs down only hurts the situation.
“We want the signs to go back up as promised, and we want them to stay up,” said Mountain View High neighbor Bijan Haghighi to the board.
“Nobody likes to live in a parking lot,” he added. “Otherwise they’d build houses facing parking lots, not golf courses.”
Haghighi lives on Bruckner Circle, a looped street that begins and ends on Truman Avenue and faces the early morning student and parent traffic to the high school. He collected signatures from more than 20 homes on nearby streets requesting that the “No Parking” signs be put back up.
Right now, Mountain View High has nearly 1,800 students, and 291 parking spots designated for students. The student body has grown by around 600 students in the past decade, and with it, student driving has increased.
By allowing student parking along the school-facing sides of Bryant and Truman avenues, the high school gains about 62 spots, which Superintendent Rich Fischer thinks could keep students from parking on other neighboring streets — a practice that has already caused neighbors on some blocks, such as Brower Avenue, to petition for “No Parking” signs to keep students out during the day.
Fischer believes that restricting parking on Bryant and Truman will simply push student cars out into the neighborhoods.
“Believe me, they will find a place to park,” Fischer said.
The school is also considering spending almost $90,000 to make about 24 more cars fit into the staff lot by repainting lines and removing some of the landscaping.
Fischer said he asked the city to take down the “No Parking” signs while the new Alta Vista High School was being built in order to decrease congestion due to the project. The signs came down with the understanding that they would return once Alta Vista was complete.
With Alta Vista now finished, Fischer held a community meeting on Feb. 28 at the high school to gather neighborhood feedback about the possibility of keeping the signs down on Bryant and Truman to provide additional student parking. Many neighbors who attended the meeting approved of Fischer’s plan, including Jane Alejandro, who lives on Oak Avenue, which also borders the high school.
“We’ve lived here for 40 years and now that they have parking [on Bryant and Truman], we have fewer problems,” she said.
Also at the Feb. 28 meeting, school resource Officer Lloyd Curns shared his observation about the yearly increase in student drivers and the shortage of spaces for cars.
“The 62 spots are just a start,” he said. “We need more parking.”
However, feedback at the recent Monday night board meeting was far less agreeable than at the community meeting. Several neighbors from Bruckner Circle said they did not receive notice about the community meeting so they could not share their views then.
The board was left with a catch-22.
“Either we open this parking space and anger the folks who’ve come here to talk to us, or anger the blocks all around,” said trustee David Williams.
Following some discussion and lengthy community comments, trustee Judy Hannemann hesitantly moved to approve keeping the “No Parking” signs off of Truman and Bryant, with a recommendation for further attention to safety and the pursuit of other solutions to the parking problem. The motion passed unanimously.
Neighbors who attended the meeting to speak against parking on Truman and Bryant were not satisfied with this decision, hoping that the board would consider many other possible solutions before increasing the number of student parking spots. They say they now intend to bring the issue before the city council.
E-mail Molly Tanenbaum at mtanenbaum@mv-voice.com
