To being a parent in America is getting to pick your kids up and drop them off at school every day. Okay, I know that video is being sarcastic. What I’m about to show you is not me being sarcastic. There are two through streets in my neighborhood that are unsafe. One that the city is dealing with in the next two years, one that the city is not planning on dealing with. And the reason their high priority is that there are three schools within a couple of blocks from each other that are public schools and then one private school. So four schools share these blocks right here. There’s also public facilities in the form of a soccer field and a track, uh, tennis courts, basketball courts, playground, um, senior workout equipment. All right here. And you can see it’s surrounded by housing. Um, but there are two arterial roads that intersect this neighborhood. And people go down these roads to connect to those arterial roads, they drive too fast. Now, I’m working on a grant to do what is called tactical day lighting. This, um, shortens the distance that pedestrians have to cross while not taking any space away from cars that are driving. It enforces a law that’s already in place, which is not parking near the intersection to increase visibility of people wanting to cross. And we’re gonna do it without taxpayers money. We’re gonna do it with a private grant, with private company. But With government oversight. So it’s all up to code. So I met with some school leadership of one of those schools to show them these plans. And instead of being overjoyed, they were upset with how it might affect the scar school pickup line in particular. There’s a school on this side of the street. There’s a school on this side of the street. The pickup line for this school, they just keep it going straight. And it crosses other streets. It just goes straight. But the school on this side of the street, instead of crossing the street and keeping the pickup line straight, it turns right and comes down this street. So when they saw this, they said, this is gonna inconvenience the school pickup line. Cause they’ll have to wait right here, see when that space is empty, and then drive around. So my suggestion is just match what the school on the other side of the street does. And make the school pickup line go straight. It’ll be fine. That’s where she said it’ll inconvenience the parents, which might lower enrollment, since it’s a charter school. And my job is not to make sure enrollment doesn’t go down. So never mind the safety of the kids that frequent these streets 24 7, 3 65. Never mind the safety of the students that are walking home. We wanna prioritize the convenience of the parents in the pickup line. Now, notice she wasn’t looking at ways to optimize The pickup line. She just wanted to maintain the status quo. Now, what’s the status quo? She told me parents get start getting there at 1:30 with their car idling, and pickup line goes until 3:30. That is to say, there are cars queued up here spewing out exhaust into the atmosphere to the nearby, you know, kids that are walking on the street for over two hours. And that’s the status quo she wants to maintain. At that point, I went home and I lost it. I wanted to get plugged back into the matrix. I wanted to not care anymore. But cooler heads prevailed. We went back with some alternate plans. They accepted them. It’s a compromise. So there’s gonna BE7, UH6 great protected intersections, and then one slightly less protected intersection. In order to maintain the status quo of the school pickup line.