They park, you pay

With schools in Charlotte-Mecklenburg and around the region open, seems like a good time to toss out some information about school traffic and school parking.

Why does morning traffic get so much worse when schools open? It isn’t just the buses. CMS’ 1,200 buses are only a drop in the bucket, traffic-wise, even if they do stop on the streets. For example, the city’s Transportation Department list of 2006 traffic counts shows that on Monday May 15, the average daily traffic, midblock on Fairview Road, west of Barclay Downs Drive, was 38,800.

What makes traffic get so much worse are the thousands of parents driving their kids to school.

I know this is a complicated issue. I’m not saying no parents should drive kids to school. Sometimes bus schedules are just too early/inconvenient/weird. Most of the CMS buses serve several schools – to use buses and drivers cost-efficiently – which means they have to start early. If you want one bus per school, be prepared to cough up more tax money. And yes, teens will whine relentlessly about how they need – need! – a car to drive to school instead of taking the bus which is for geeky freshmen, and so on.

But consider the following factoids I extracted from the folks at CMS who design new schools. When CMS buys land for schools, and has to design them, here’s what they’re required to supply:

High schools: Student parking for 350 cars. Staff parking for 170-200 cars. Visitor parking, 35 cars. The bus lot has to hold 40 buses.

It costs $4,000 to build one automobile (non-bus) parking space, in labor, asphalt, etc. That figure doesn’t include the land costs. So let’s see, figuring space for 200 staff cars, auto parking at a new CMS high school costs $2.34 million to build. That doesn’t include the cost of school bus parking, or land. Student parking alone is $1.4 million.

Let’s talk land. Figure a 9-by-18-foot student parking space, and you get 56,700 square feet for student parking. Figuring roughly $60,000-an-acre land costs (CMS director of architecture Tony Ansaldo cautions that’s a blunt estimate, and that each site is different, etc., etc.), and 43,560 square feet per acre, that’s $46,080 in land cost alone, for a 350-car student parking lot.

Here are stats for middle and elementary schools:

Middle: Staff parking, 138 cars. Visitor parking, 50 cars. Bus lot, 25 buses. Cost of parking (again, not including bus parking or land): $752,000.

Elementary: Staff/visitor parking, 125 cars. Cost of parking (not including bus space or land), $500,000.

Here’s something else driving up school-building costs. Schools have to build plenty of on-site “stacking” – a technical term that means driveway space to allow cars to line up one behind the other, as in car pool lines. The city of Charlotte doesn’t want any of those cars out on city streets, even small neighborhood streets. And in many cases CMS would want the stacking space regardless of CDOT requirements, for safety reasons.

High school stacking: 1,170 lineal feet, typically 12-foot-wide lanes, for 14,040 square feet of “stacking” – a hair shy of a third of an acre, and roughly $20,000 in land costs. (This doesn’t count paving cost.)

Middle schools: 2,003 lineal feet, totalling 24,036 square feet, or .55 of an acre, with estimated land cost of $33,100.

Elementary schools: 1,323 lineal feet, totalling 15,876 square feet, or .36 acre, land cost $21,600.

High schools have less, because more kids drive themselves. And park.

Obviously it’s not a good idea to let schools’ dropoff and pickup traffic clog busy streets, such as thoroughfares. But this IS a city, after all. We have a large and growing city bus system. Plus CMS runs its own public transit system, the school buses. It’s time to look closely at how much we’re spending to let students park and let parents sit in long carpool lines, at schools that are already paying to provide transportation.

Finally, consider this: If it’s a question of building a neighborhood school close enough to a neighborhood so kids can easily walk, and letting some cars back up on a neighborhood street for 15 minutes twice a day, or else building on a site big enough to accommodate more than a third of a mile of driveway on site (2,003 feet is .38 mile -- and remember, it takes up to half an acre more land), that’s a no-brainer.

Eastover Elementary was built in 1935 on a tight site smack in the middle of a neighborhood. I hear cars do stack up on Cherokee Road when school opens and lets out. Guess what? Neighborhood drivers may be annoyed now and again, but Eastover doesn’t seem to be hurting from it. It’s one of the city’s most desirable places to live.

Schools and transportation folks need to rethink how much parking and driveway space they’re having to build.