The recent Voice report on the Mountain View-Los Altos School Board meeting of March 13, in which angry neighbors asked for increased safety and the administration asked them to recognize teenagers’ right to drive, struck a resonant chord.
How possible is it to change a high school culture of driving to school?
I bear good news. Faced with the same problem of congested streets around a high school, with pedestrians and cyclists dodging cars, Gunn High School, located only six miles away, has managed to successfully reduce its traffic. Gunn’s program, GOFAST (Gunn Organization for Alternative, Safe Traffic), was a community effort that worked.
Founded in 2001, GOFAST asked the Gunn students what it would take to use alternative transportation (walk, bus, bike, carpool) instead of driving alone. “Make it cheaper and more convenient to come by alternative transportation rather than driving alone” was the answer.
Following the students’ own assessment, GOFAST laid a new sidewalk, increased bus service, made it safer to cycle into campus, and gave prizes to cyclists. It raised parking fees and used those fees to subsidize bus fares.
The most dramatic results came from students using carpools instead of driving alone. First dibs on parking permits, including close-up spaces, and much cheaper permit fees went to carpoolers. (State law allows kids to carpool after the driver turns 17.) The number of student solo drivers dropped precipitously, carpooling shot up, and traffic shrank.
Mountain View High’s limited parking lot is testimony to the fact that this school was not built for the number of drivers now coming to school. Either the school’s parking needs will flow out to the neighborhood, or the problem must be re-framed. Instead of asking where can we find enough parking, the community can ask how to reduce the number of cars coming to school.
GOFAST’s success depended partly on its membership. It was a true community effort. Parents, neighbors, students, school administration, district staff, school board members, city staff and city council members all belonged to this group. Instead of the district saying that these are public streets and it’s the city’s problem, or the city saying these are students clogging streets and it’s the district’s problem, or the neighbors saying it’s obviously the school’s problem, the community recognized traffic reduction and safety as a joint responsibility.
The issue of students parking on neighborhood streets was a particular problem Gunn shared with Mountain View High. When a subcommittee of neighbors, parents, city staff, school administration and the police found a successful solution, the process of jointly sorting out the practicality of different solutions was more than half the success.
Mountain View can find answers — ways to reduce traffic to the school — that are fitted to its own community. There is no narrow prescription for success in reducing traffic around a high school. But GOFAST can offer a general model and a hope, as it has to Analy High School in Sonoma and Milpitas High School. Both these communities are finding their own solutions to reducing traffic.
No one wants to wait until an accident results in a student injury or death. Safety is more basic to schools’ responsibility than even education.
Joan Marx is a Palo Alto resident and a founding member of GOFAST.
