By: Celina Mahabir
Picture this: you live off-campus. You’re already having a rough morning. Your alarm refused to go off on time, the hot water in your shower ran out the moment you turned it on and your car is low on gas. Even worse, there’s bumper-to-bumper traffic on the highway and it just so happens your first class is with your least favorite professor.
At least it might be easy to find a parking space, right?
Wrong.
It doesn’t matter if you’re going to the parking garage in front of the Parker building, the UC parking lot, the Mailman parking lot or the DeSantis parking lot. You’ll spend a good half-hour circulating like a vulture for an empty space because the parking lots are stuffed with the cars of residential students. And the minute you think you’ve found one? Think again, because there’s a cute little red motorcycle in that spot you’re be tempted to run right over. So you just keep driving until you end up in a parking space on the fourth floor of the garage or good mile’s walk away from where you need to be.
There are 1,287 parking spaces on campus. Well, maybe not that many, but there are definitely a lot. I’m sure commuter students agree that it’s frustrating when you have the longest morning only to be greeted by a parking lot filled with cars from students who refuse to walk across the street to campus. Nonetheless, some readers may be thinking, “Why are you complaining when it was your decision to commute from home in the first place?”
As commuter students, we should have access to readily-available parking spaces when we get to campus. We don’t have the luxury of calling campus our home or being able to cross the street in order to get from our bedroom to class. It is our decision to commute, but the time it takes for us to look for a parking space is unnecessary. Save the environment and ride a bike, walk, ride a skateboard or piggyback on your friend. The amount of time it’d take you or the gas you’d waste to get in your car and find a space of your own is not worth the thirty-second drive.
Overall, do commuter students a favor and try not to force us to park in the middle of Narnia by packing the lots like a game of Parking Mania.
