Inadequate parking lots at Davis High, students say

PHOTO: A bird’s eye view of the Veterans Memorial Center parking lot at Davis High.

By Alex Miyamoto,

BlueDevilHUB.com Staff–

The parking lots at Davis High reach capacity bright and early as students cramp into the two student lots before first period. The final bell rings and school begins session; students that arrive at school late face the problem of searching for an available parking space.

Approximately 390 parking spaces are available for the 1,700 students across the two main parking lots at DHS. The Veterans Memorial Center parking lot offers around 300 spaces for students.

Although the VMC parking lot is bigger than the stadium lot, availability becomes sparse as community members share the lot throughout the day. Community members use the VMC lot to access COVID-19 testing and the tennis courts at DHS, creating additional traffic.

“I once spent 30 minutes trying to find a parking space,” junior Riana Gonzales said. Students that are unsuccessful finding parking spaces in the main two lots resort to parking on the street or at alternative facilities.

In the past, the Mary L. Stephens Library parking lot had been used by students, but DHS administration requested that students leave the spaces available for library visitors.

Haley Birkland teaches history at DHS and noticed that the parking lots this year have not always been packed. 

“Tenth graders have their driver’s licenses and are driving themselves to school now. At the beginning of the school year the lots always had some empty spaces … but this semester the open parking spots have decreased,” Birkland said.

Additionally, with the recent start of construction at DHS, “we lost roughly 15 spaces from the All Student Center parking lot for staff which has spilled over to the stadium and student lots” said head of facilities at DHS, Jeff Lorenson.

With the loss of staff parking spaces, DHS staff uses student parking.

Junior Chelsea Jacobson recalled that after unsuccessful attempts at finding parking she reluctantly parked in a staff parking spot. Jacobson knew it was prohibited and reserved for staff only but decided to park, not wanting to be late. She was later ticketed for parking in the reserved spot.

Now, Jacobson avoids tickets and plans ahead by “either arriving early or I like to park on the street sometimes.” 

Enforcement of staff parking began in September 2019 and is managed by the City of Davis and the Davis Police Department. Officers patrol the parking spaces and ticket the student cars in staff lots.

Staff have separate parking lots and also have reserved spots in the student parking lots. 

The stadium lot is the smaller of the two designated student parking lots and has the capacity to hold 84 student vehicles and 25 staff vehicles.

Both Jacobson and Gonzales agreed that building a new lot would solve parking congestion. “I’ve seen other school parking lots where each student gets their own space … they can paint them too, it looks really cool,” Jacobson said.

While other schools have more parking lot space, Lorenson expressed that there are insufficient amounts of land that could be used towards building additional parking.

Lorenson encourages “staff and students to use alternative transportation such as carpooling, biking or walking when possible.”

Alternative transportation methods would free up the parking lots, “ … if everyone carpooled the lots would free up so much,” Jacobson said.