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Pleading for parking

scott cookEveryone knows what they would like out of a ‘perfect day.’ What that consists of varies from person to person, whether it consists of relaxing, working successfully, or spending time with loved ones. My idea of the ideal day, as you might imagine, encapsulates a few of those aspects. I would like to wake up looking flawless, read the newspaper with a hot latté in my hand, then drive to school, miraculously avoiding all of the dreadful morning traffic. Upon arriving, I would find a parking spot on Holt Avenue in front of Greek Row prime real estate. From there I would excel in every class, have dinner with my family, and spend the night out with friends. Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? Yet unattainable in so many ways.

Now, there are a multitude of reasons this idyllic day also happens to be impossible. I am human. I do not wake up looking #flawless. Rush hour traffic will always exist. And no one can excel at everything. My one small request though (that in reality is not much of a request at all) is to be able to find a parking spot when I arrive on campus. No such luck. Since the beginning of the semester, as many an off-campus student will tell you, convenient parking has been virtually unavailable. Just this morning when arriving for class I drove down Holt desperately looking for a place to leave my truck. Finding nothing to offer there, I drove to Ollie Avenue next to Sutton where, of course, there was a large work truck blocking most of the entrance. And because I do not drive a compact car, there was no way I would be able to squeeze in between to hopefully find a vacant spot. So off to the parking garage I went, parking on the fourth floor, and running off to class an embarrassing 10 minutes late, and I am not alone.

Between the parking lot in front of the Bursar office being zoned off and the successive delays in completion of both the new soccer field and Dave’s Boathouse, parking has become more and more scarce. A student searching for a place to leave his or her car for an hour can get pretty irritated pretty fast.
Upon mention of the parking lot debacle, Cygell Pavao ’16 exclaimed “Why should upperclassmen pay for a parking pass that allows ‘on-campus’ parking if there isn’t any on campus places to park?”

Any reasonably minded person might very well ask the same question. When you pay for a good or service, you expect it to be available. That is how capitalist America functions. On a private school campus however, not so much. For the time being, it seems we will all simply have to deal with it, so I leave you with two pieces of advice: leave earlier than you normally would so you may have a chance at grabbing a parking space, and if you have to get creative about where you are leaving your car, well, be careful. I could go into the number of parking tickets I have gotten just this week, but that is its own lengthy rant. Let us hope the downstairs bar and Italian-ordered turf make up for our parking troubles soon enough.

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