Traffic is a struggle that everyone will have to deal with at some point in their life.  Many people think of traffic being on the highways on the way to work, but for Stillwater, it’s a different story.

In the mornings during the school year, Highway 5 near the high school is a wreck. There is an influx of cars every morning on the way to school.  There are so many cars that the stoplight gets backed up a quarter mile in every direction.  The newly added stop signs in the high school parking lot are not helping.  The stop signs are backing up traffic coming from Woodbury and Afton even further.

“I am regularly late to school by a few minutes, I leave around 7:10 a.m. and I live 15 minutes away.  I usually take 10 which is a 55 mile per hour road so it shouldn’t take that long, yet it does.  It takes twice as long for everyone to get into the parking lot now, people have to stop and go constantly,” said senior Emma Abrahamson.

People drive past the high school trying to get to work every morning along with the students trying to get to school so the traffic situation is affecting hundreds of people.  Much of the time, the people trying to get to work are late and they don’t want to have to deal with the often bad driving of the students.  The people trying to get to work can be very impatient in the morning.

“One day we were turning from Highway 5 going south onto 58th street on the way to school.  The light on Neal was red so we got stuck in the intersection.  A city bus then tried to go north on Highway 5 but we were in the way.  He kept honking, yelling and flicking us off.  Then he started edging forward and almost hit us.  The light on Neal eventually turned green and we got out of the way,” said sophomore Autumn Decenzo.

 The stop signs make the traffic much worse than it needs to be. They just back it up and make it more of a struggle.  The fact that they barely plow the parking lot also makes it even worse.

“The signs are a giant waste of time and money.  The money could have been used for a number of other things at our school.  All the signs do is back up traffic and irritate people.  Half of the time, people don’t even obey the signs.  No one uses the cross walks either, especially now with the snow; it’s a free for all.  The traffic would be better off without the stop signs,” said junior David Guild.

This problem has been going on for years and makes people late all of the time.  Something needs to be done to solve this issue.