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The worst problem plaguing the city’s exclusive preschools is poor street access for chauffeured transportation:

The cars gather in front of the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan about 8:30 a.m. In the front seats sit hired drivers (nobody uses the term chauffeur anymore). The cars are mostly big and mostly black luxury-edition sport utility vehicles like the Mercedes GL-Class or the GMC Yukon Denali. They fill the lanes in front of the Y’s entrance on Lexington Avenue, often two or three rows deep.

It looks like the outside of an arbitrage house just before trading hours, or perhaps the Knicks’ private entrance to Madison Square Garden on game day.

Until, that is, the drivers open the back-seat doors and the passengers’ feet emerge.

These are not the feet of profit-takers or N.B.A. players. These feet wear Sonnet Maryjanes and Primigi sneakers with Velcro closure straps.

These feet are only a half-foot long.

The children — ages 3 through 5 — are enrolled at the Y’s famous nursery school. The livery convention on Lexington Avenue occurs most every weekday. Neighbors of the Y and parents with children in the nursery school say they have seen the number of cars and drivers increase considerably over the past couple of years.

In exasperation, the director of the school, Nancy Schulman, drafted a letter to all families insisting that the drivers wait somewhere else while parents or baby sitters take the children in: find a legal parking space, or take their cars for a few spins around the block.

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The Y is hardly the only school in the neighborhood where children get to school by car and driver. Dropoff hour at Nightingale-Bamford, on 92nd Street between Madison and Fifth Avenues, and at Dalton’s lower school, on 91st between Park and Madison, is often clogged by chauffeured S.U.V.’s.

Dalton’s chief financial officer, Ned Pinger, stands outside every morning to greet students, which often involves opening doors and helping them out of the back seat. “The heads of elementary schools are often outside doing this, and it becomes a little ridiculous,” said Sandra R. Bass, who publishes Private School Insider, a newsletter for New York parents. “You can’t tell who the master is in this situation.”

. . .

A parent whom other parents identified as a chauffeur-using mother, Alison Schneider, whose husband, Jack Schneider, is a hedge fund manager, said, “I got the letter, but I don’t really have any feelings about it one way or the other. It’s kind of boring. It’s about cars and parking.”

Over the past couple of weeks, a staff member from the Y’s nursery school has been seen directing waiting cars away from the school. The chauffeurs idled in double-parked formation one block farther down Lexington, or around the corner on 91st Street. Posters to the New York bulletin board of the Web site Urbanbaby.com, which is popular with mothers of young children, have occasionally made note of the scene. “So this morning I was at the 92nd Street Y and there were 10 black Escalades and Range Rovers double-parked with huge guys in black suits,” one wrote last month.