Charter school offers plan to ease chronic traffic woes

Somerset Academy is offering Pembroke Pines a solution to the chronic traffic backups that plague the neighborhood every school day.

Neighbors have complained for years that the stacking of cars for drop-offs and pick-ups at the Chapel Trail campus, at Johnson Street and Northwest 208th Avenue, ruin their morning commutes, sometimes even making it tough for them to back out of their own driveways.

Now the A-rated school is proposing:

To move grades K-4 to a new south campus to be built about three miles away on Pines Boulevard, near 198th Street.

To offer a “bus depot” lot at the south campus where parents can drop off their children to catch a bus to the north campus.

Tweaks to traffic patterns on streets near the school. The city’s engineering department would have to approve those suggestions, including the elimination of a U-turn and imposing “nothrough traffic.” An employee parking area. Traffic studies estimate that about 2,000 cars flow through the neighborhoods by the school from 7 to 8 a.m. Last year a reduction in the number of buses at the academy put more vehicles on the road at that time.

Last year residents urged city officials to do something about the congestion and the city opened the Rose Price Park just east of the campus to allow parents to drop off their children, but that was considered a temporary solution.

The school’s new proposals are longer term.

Commissioners are expected to consider the school’s plan during a city commission meeting on Nov. 1.