I drive through the south side of campus every day on my way to work and wonder why the south zone dorm residents continue to park on the sides of through streets and get numerous tickets each day. On my way back from lunch, I did a little drive through and came to a startling discovery: There simply aren’t enough spots for everyone who lives in the south zone dorms. I think it’s ridiculous that students pay tuition to go to school, pay housing fees to live in the dorms and pay parking services to have a spot that supposedly costs $50 a year to maintain for them to park in, but then, during the day, there aren’t even enough spots for them, so they have to be ticketed multiple times in one day for parking in areas that aren’t designated as parking spots.
This also affects others, since the excess dorm residents will overflow into other zones, such as the small staff lots that dot the extreme south side of the campus and commuter east and west zones, which we all know are also well over-crowded.
I hear excuses like, they can park at the coliseum parking lot, but that’s unacceptable. The coliseum is on the extreme north side of campus, and these dorms are on the extreme south end. There is one shuttle that runs to and from the coliseum, but it’s a half-hour wait/trip, and that would only get them halfway to their dorm. The shuttles aren’t set up for inter-campus transit now anyway as they only service the people who live/park on the outermost extremities of the campus and take around.
If the university builds dorms to house students and then restricts where they can park, they need to provide enough parking spots at a reasonably close proximity for their tenants.
Having a freshman girl have to park and walk clear across campus to her dorm late at night seems to be one of those things we’re discouraging lately isn’t it. And walking across campus in the day’s heat is just bound to cause some sort of medical-related accident!
Tom Mason is a senior majoring in software engineering and works as a computer electronics technician on campus. He can be contacted at [email protected].