Using Northfield Parkway or Long Lake to leave or enter Troy High School is a universal routine for both the students and staff. Using the adjacent parking lot becomes a point of contention in entering or exiting the school because nearly everyone has to use it at the same time. The result is an immovable system that some view as manageable at worst, while others describe it as a daily source of frustration or danger.
Joyce Mettias, a senior, calls traversing through the school parking lot a “war zone,” specifically during the afternoon rush. “If you park somewhere [and] you have to reverse out, you’re cooked; you’re not getting home in the next hour,” she explains. Mettias shares that the general congestion is not the only problem but how people move through it. “Some people are trying to cut up at like 30 mph while some cars are trying to get out,” she says.
One of Mettias’ main gripes with the parking lot congestion is pedestrian behavior: “It’s more so the people walking. They’re not paying attention to cars. They just trust the cars will stop,” she says. Beyond everyday mild annoyances, Mettias admits to also having “witnessed multiple accidents,” calling them “pretty common,” and recalls a friend being rear-ended twice this year: “It shouldn’t be fight or flight every time just getting out of school,” she says.
In contrast, many other students, such as senior Swathi Jeeda, view the parking lot as imperfect but not completely unworkable. Despite the occasional close calls “when people are getting out of their cars [and] you have to try not to run them over,” she admits to believing the lot is “as efficient as it really can be.” After school, she says to avoid the rush entirely: “I won’t try to get out of the parking lot after school. I’ll just wait until it’s clear to go to my car.”
When asked about how traffic has changed in her time at the school, Jessica Craft, a teacher at Troy High School, responded: “It has progressively gotten worse, especially the morning traffic.” But she doesn’t place the blame on the students as she thinks they “do a pretty good job in the morning of following the rules,” she says. “I hate to say it, but it’s the parents; they don’t follow the order of where they’re supposed to go,” Craft adds.
Craft attributes the real problem to when parents drive their kids to school: “They drop off in random areas that are not designated drop offs so it slows everyone down.” Craft’s view is that the structure itself is not the issue: “I think it’s the number of kids that get dropped off.”
As a solution, Craft wants to get across to underclassmen students and their families that “if more kids rode the bus, that would put an end to a lot of the traffic.” She adds that when taking the bus, it is “helping the parking lot be a safer place with fewer cars and you’re helping your teachers arrive at school on time.”
Despite the wide range of opinions from students and teachers, they mostly agree that the problem is less from institutional design and more from how the lot is used. Whether it’s aggressive driving, distracted pedestrians or parent drop offs, the congestion reveals a shared responsibility. Unless there are drastic changes in behavior or students opt out for alternatives like taking the bus, the traffic will likely remain an unavoidable part of the school day.
