Ask any student who has tried to deal with driving and its assorted tribulations on Grounds, and you are likely to get a thousand-yard stare. Cars are less of a luxury and more of a necessity for many students. They enable students to get groceries, work part-time jobs, visit home on short notice and overall have a degree of autonomy of movement. Despite this, parking spots are few and far between on Grounds, whether for an event, housing or gym usage. While it would be unwise to fix the issue by transforming the architectural splendor of the University into a series of towering parking garages, change is overdue. As it stands, the current parking system is convoluted, and the University must reinstitute affordability and accessibility.
At the University, parking comes in a couple of different forms. For visitors, event attendees and gymgoers, the ParkMobile app is used to pay for parking. At the gyms, parking is sparse, with a low proportion of available spots to daily gym attendees. For residential parking, students are hard-pressed to find spots on Grounds. First years are prohibited from bringing cars, except in extenuating circumstances. In all these cases, parking also tends to be pricey for students.
Consequently, first-year dorm buildings have very few, if any, parking spots. For upperclassmen, parking is not a guarantee, depending on their housing assignment. These factors combine to result in a parking system that alienates students who live on Grounds from their broader surroundings and limits students who live off Grounds from their access to key University facilities. All students, therefore, suffer in various ways from an inaccessible and unaffordable system which both limits their ability to obtain key needs such as food and work and also institutes excessive charges for those with cars…