For 40 weeks of the year, juniors and seniors who drive to school arrive at Lexington High School faced with the same challenge: finding a place to park. On campus parking at LHS is reserved for staff and faculty; students are encouraged to walk, bike, or ride the bus to school. Those who drive must park on the streets near the high school.
As a result, many LHS students park along neighboring streets, creating an issue for neighboring residents.
“There are five cars in front of your house for most of the day,” said Tom Fleming, a Lexington resident who attended a recent meeting about the new high school for abutters. “We had a student for a couple of weeks in private parking on our street until we had to explain to them that they could not be there,” Fleming explained.
The new school building will not change that. During the abutters meeting last month, the design team reiterated that there will continue to be no parking for students on campus.
Fleming compared the current parking situation to a “Darwinian environment,” in which only the fittest survive. Devam Morparia, a senior at LHS, echoed this sentiment.
“If you want to get a good spot, you have to get to school 20 to 30 minutes early,” Morparia said. “The later you get to school, the further you have to park, which is sometimes all the way near Hayden.”
Parking far away can become hazardous in extreme weather like we’ve had recently.
“When there is a lot of snow, there is no way to get from your car to the sidewalk and people end up walking on the road. Sometimes, the sidewalk is icy and slippery,” Morparia told LexObserver.
The active construction of the new high school could exacerbate the parking situation.
“You are going to have a huge construction project, and potentially multiple other construction projects in the neighborhood,” Fleming told LexObserver. “That is the major transit point for construction workers and materials into the site.”
Currently, the new high school plans on having 500 parking spaces across three different lots. However, the School Building Committee decided to allocate them to teachers and staff only.
“There was not enough room to add student parking without the expensive addition of a parking garage to the campus,” Joe Pato, a member of the Building Committee, said.
The town’s approach to easing the parking crunch is focused on reducing the reliance on driving.
“We hope more students will make use of walking, bicycling, school and MBTA buses, and carpooling rather than driving,” Pato added.
Fleming, however, argued that these alternatives have not been sufficiently advertised or made accessible to students.
“There should be ideas of making public transit more desirable for students,” Fleming said. “Students are often told they should walk or take the bus, but the town hasn’t done a good job making public transit visible, accessible, or appealing.”
For now, the School Building Committee plans to prioritize staff parking while encouraging alternative modes of transportation. Students who choose to drive will continue to face the daily challenge of finding a place to park, a problem with no easy fix.
The Lincoln Park parking lot sits largely unused during the school day and could be used for student parking. Some upgrades would be needed to provide a secure path from the parking lot to the community path, and the path would need to be plowed during the winter.
Also, the Town is actively studying ideas to upgrade connections from the Minuteman Bikeway to the high school to encourage more walking and biking.