Is the word “parking” ever a good thing that comes to mind for college students? Maybe a few students out of an entire university can say yes while the rest would say it’s a living nightmare. One of the biggest challenges of a school or university is that there are more students than parking spaces, so eveyone is on the hunt for a single spot. Finding a spot is so hard that those who manage to find one feel like they’ve won something big.
At Whittier College, despite the fact that it’s a private liberal arts college with only 1,300 students, parking is also very hard to find, but that hard-to-find parking just got ten times more difficult when the parking comittee decided at the beginning of the 2017 school year to assign certain parking lots to certain groups, such as boarding students, commuters, and faculty.
This new regulation makes finding parking a lot more intense, especially for commuters, as almost every lot is for either teachers or boarding students, leaving commuters with only two lots that are always packed. What is the input on this new regualtion and how are people reacting to it? Campus safety and students had a chance share what they think about the new regulation.
With the new school year starting, learning about a new parking regulation got almost everyone stressing, especially commuters, as they seem to be the most prevalent victims of this new policy.
During the first few weeks of the new school year, I as a commuter, followed the new rule and was late to class for the first two weeks due to looking for spots only in the commuter lot. Looking for so long eventually made me mad, as I can never find a spot in time and would always show up late for class. When some of the commuters were interviewed, it turned out that they were experiencing the same thing.
A friend and also a commuter, Jason Chang, states, “Why did this even happen? I’m a commuter, and now life at this school for me got a lot harder.” After interviewing other commuters, they stated exactly the same thing.
Then all the commuters that were interviewed, including myself as a commuter, stopped caring, and we decided, let’s park in a different lot and see what happens. My friend Jason and I have been doing this together since the third week of school; we parked in a teachers’ lot that was always empty to see what would happen. We soon realized that as long as you had a parking decal, nothing mattered.
After then the commuters were interviewed again once they started parking in a different lot, and they all said how much life is easier now.
After interviewing the commuters and getting all their thoughts, it was time to ask some members of the campus safety crew about what their input is on the new parking regulations. While they were patrolling campus in their car, they stopped to answer questions. Student Anthony Correa who works for campus safety revealed the view of the campus police — that the new rule is very important and that they ticket people due to what parking decal they have.
Even though they said that, what they are looking for more is whether or not cars have parking stickers and if they are parked in a legitimate parking spot. They mentioned that if a car is parked in the commuter lot in a space with only one line, they’ll ticket that vehicle. Campus safety always strolls around to look for stickers on people’s cars, mostly cracking down on people parking on campus without a decal. Despite the new rules and the campus safety following it, Anthony stated that “Campus safety hates this new regulation as much as all the students do since its a waste of time and really unneccessary.”
Although info was recevied by both the students and campus safety of the parking regulations, the biggest challenge was to get the reason from the parking committee as to why they decided to do the big change on the parking situation. And yet in this situation, the parking committee was unknown to a lot of people until everybody found out that the parking committee had decided to make new regulations before the school year even started. Attempts to find out as much as possible about the parking committee were a no-go; nobody asked seemed to know who or what the parking committee really was. Those who did comment could only say, “It’s scattered around campus and it’s a staff committee.” After trying a few weeks and still not finding anything, I decided that this would be a dead end. However, one aspect of the new parking rule is no mystery at all. I did get almost every affected group’s input on the parking rules and everybody says the same thing: “Get rid of this rule.”
As one can tell, parking on school campus is one of the worst aspects of college life. Yes, college can be a fun experience, but in almost every case, there is no escaping the parking. When you go to school, unless you live on campus, you’re going to have to find a spot to leave your car. Unfortunately, that’s often almost impossible, as spots are never numerous enough and there are way too many students. Parking at Whittier College has always been a big challenge despite the fact that it’s a small liberal arts college. Even though it was already hard enough to find parking, the school decided that it’s somehow necessary to make it even harder than it already is by designating each lot around the school for only certain people. Once the regukation went into effect, parking became even more difficult, until people just stopped caring and decided to park anywhere. If there’s one thing we can learn from this, it is that colleges shouldn’t make something worse if it’s bad enough already.