The road not taken

A never ending line of cars lead up to the entrance of school each morning as vehicles and students alike weave through the crowded intersection. According to a survey of 120 students, approximately 63 percent of students think public transportation in Southern California is inaccessible.
Unlike areas around the world in which the public transportation systems are already heavily established, Southern California does not have such a setup. Without a system that can connect the entire region and enable easy travel, students here grow up in an environment where cars are the most common means of transportation.
“I ride buses when I’m in Europe, [but] never in California,” said licensed junior Nic Wainwright, who drives himself to school each morning. “People grow up in Europe with public transportation as the norm. Here in California, we grow up thinking cars are the best and most independent way of travel.”
The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) bus station, which provides one of the stops across from Peninsula, schedules one bus every thirty to forty minutes for students heading up and down Hawthorne Blvd. The long and inconvenient wait in between buses interferes with student schedules and results in students choosing to drive or walk instead.
“I think [students using public transportation] would be great—I think there should be more buses [and] I think they should run them more quickly—every ten minutes or every five and just keep the transportation going,” campus supervisor Jim Lillie said.
The lack of an efficient system also causes significant traffic issues in the morning at school to the point in which it has become dangerous for students crossing the intersection.
“It is [getting] worse and worse,” Lillie said. “Because we only have four campus supervisors here, we can’t really oversee [everything]. What I see is a lot of the cars [in] the left turn lane [and] the right turn lane, people coming across, the kids still walking on the crosswalk, and the cars are coming.”
Public transportation systems have the ability to change multitudinous aspects of daily life, such as the heavy traffic that students find themselves in each morning. Due to the lack of an inefficient system, however, students rarely consider public transportation. For everyone’s benefit the system in this region is due for an upgrade.