If you don't like it, VOTE.

[AriRashkae]

I don't want to go into Fratching, but I'd prefer not to have a large house of worship of any kind near me. There are several Catholic churches in my area and I'm glad they're all over a mile away. They have schools, bingo nights, and multiple masses. The amount of traffic they generate can be crazy, and with all the events there, you never know when you'll run into a backup.

Any kind of meeting hall, secular or religious, that generates that much traffic is definitely NIMBY for me.

Gotta agree with you there. I have a house of worship (what type doesn't really matter, does it? ) at the end of my street, about a block from my house, and with everything that goes on (services, AAA, charity tag sales, etc) the little side street I'm on gets pretty choked up when people decide to park on both sides of the street, leaving just enough room for 1 car to pass through. Worse are the people who need to stand by their car doors and chat, while you're trying to get by.

[cinema guy]

There is a small town where I used to work. There was a significant expansion of housing. The building company offered to build a school for free, but the council declined, anticipating that childless, wealthier, couples would be the ones to move in to these new homes and they wouldn't want to be bothered by children. Of course within a year or two, childless couples become parents, so a school has to be built. And the local authority has to pay for it.

[Stryker One]

Yikes

the handicap kids had to go to burning down before the millage passed

Handicap kids had to die before a new school was built?!?

[EricKei]

Sounds like where I live o_O

1 block south: house of worship. Across from that, 40 feet away: school that incorporates a house of worship. 2 blocks west of that: another school. 3 blocks east of "one block south" -- you guessed it, another house of worship. another HoW on the next corner east from there. All for different variations on the theme "religion".

Just for balance: 3 blocks north: bar. NEXT CORNER east from there: bar. daycare/schoolish thing in between.

[wagegoth]

Then there are the parent/teacher conferences and other events at that place. All of those events quickly fill up the tiny parking lot there. When that happens, our one-way street becomes an impassable nightmare--idiots parked on both sides of the street, with a narrow "road" between. Does that stop them from driving like Mario Andretti? Of course not!

The elementary school my younger son attends, gets absolutely crazy during morning and afternoon pickups. They actually changed the parking lot so that people could drive through by making it a U-shaped loop, but people would stop for so long, or illegally park and then walk their kids in, that we just started dropping our son across the street.

However, whenever they have big events, they open up the gates and allow cars to park on part of the playground that's blacktopped. It cuts way down on the street parkers.


I'm sure I posted before about the morning last year when we did go through the looping lot. We were waiting behind a couple of cars to pull onto the street, when this woman pulled into the red zone (-50 right there), stops for .5 seconds, and as her son is getting out, pulls away, with him still partially caught in the seatbelt. He fell heavily onto the sidewalk, at which point it seemed to dawn on her that not actually stopping makes it hard for people to exit the car.

My husband and another dad jumped out of their cars and ran over there. They got school employees to come out and wanted to call an ambulance, but the woman freaked and said she'd take her son directly to the doctor. We got the license plate and the school reported the incident.

[protege]

Part of the problem with that school...is that it's been expanded so much over the years, that there's literally nowhere for it to grow. I'm sure when that place was built in the 1950s, there wasn't much nearby. I know that the area was built-up, but things simply weren't designed to handle as many people as they currently do. Now, that school is hemmed-in on all sides by housing and stores. They could expand the parking lot a bit, but I'm not sure the people who live below the school would want to lose their privacy when the trees come down. Nor would they tolerate additional rainwater runoff if that entire area was paved over.

[AccountingDrone]

Yeah, some people just can't handle change and some people just like to complain.

We'd been singing the same Gloria, Sanctus, and Fraction at church for years and recently our choirmaster and priest together decided that that was boring and that the congregation should learn (over time) at least some of the other lovely versions in the BCP. You should have seen some of the old biddies going off after service the first week we switched. You'd have thought some major sin had been committed. Obviously, in their minds, the only sanctioned versions were the ones we'd been singing forever. Oh noes! I have to actually look in the book for the first time in 20 years!

dang, im not even a practicing christian and I know at lesat 3 different versions of the Doxology, and at least 3 Glorias, and a 3 fold, a 5 fold , a 7 fold and a full Allelulia. I spent way too much time in the competition choral group in high school =)

[elsporko]

Handicap kids had to die before a new school was built?!?

Luckily the fire occured in the early morning before anybody was there. My dad is the president of the school board and we live less then a block from that school so he was one of the first people on the scene. The joke became that he was the one that started the fire in order to get the new school built.