Opinion: Commuter parking

When commuter students arrived for the Fall 2018 semester, the concept of guaranteed parking spots became a distant memory. The new commuter parking passes created a traffic free-for-all. 

Students lapped the parking lots for upwards of 30 minutes, scanning for any open spaces. Some eventually settled for spots far away from their destination. Frustrations continued to grow.

During the first-week-of-school chaos, LUPD sent out several emails attempting to persuade commuter students to fill up all the empty parking spots at the East Campus Satellite parking lot — commonly known as Zone 4. The problem seemed to be commuters clogging up Main Campus by driving around in circles, waiting for someone to pull out of a parking spot closer to their classroom.

Apparently, too few students took LUPD up on that less-than-tantalizing offer, communicating by their refusal to park in the satellite lot. For them, the joy of commuting does not also entail hiking to class from one of the farthest corners of campus. 

And so LUPD sweetened the deal by offering East Campus Satellite parking passes for $25 each semester, rather than the alternative $100 all-inclusive parking pass. Only time will tell how many have resigned themselves to the East Campus Satellite parking wasteland.

As a commuter student, I have my personal ways of working around the parking challenges, as I believe many of us commuters do. We figure out our own schedule, and then we figure out the ebb and flow of each lot throughout the day, and eventually, we know where we need to be and when we need to be there to make it work. 

But despite this, I still hear frequent complaints and jokes about on-campus parking as fellow students express frustration with the current system.

Liberty University has committed to building a new parking garage, Vice President Dan Deter announced. While that won’t alleviate the current parking woes, the school is committed to getting this problem fixed for students and faculty.

Liberty is far from being the first university to struggle with accommodating its thousands of students and faculty in limited parking spaces across campus. A New York Times article published in 2017 bemoaned the challenges of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as its parking space-to-student ratio was only one space for every five of their
65,000 students.

Gary A. Brown, the director of campus planning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, suggested that as ride and car-sharing services like Uber and Lyft have gained and continue to gain popularity, they will eliminate the number of students driving personal vehicles, along with the need for more on-campus parking.

Perhaps Brown’s prediction could happen. Still, that does not solve today’s parking problem.

But when I investigated how to improve parking on college campuses, I found that Liberty does implement most of the recommended solutions. Improvements can be made, but LUPD is doing what it can.

A University Business article listing 10 solutions for campus traffic and parking mentions providing shuttle service. 

Done.

The article also recommends: raising the rates, staggering class times and stopping traffic during the day.

Done, done and done, at the cost of afternoon errand trips to Walmart — goodbye left turns and straightaways on Wards Road between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m.

That being said, this is my advice to my fellow students: just go with the flow. 

No one enjoys leaving half an hour early to find parking on campus, but right now, that is just the way it is. 

When you end up in the recesses of Liberty Mountain Drive on a cold winter day wondering how long you will suffer before the 72 bus arrives to relieve you of your shivers, remember that you only paid $25 for your parking pass, and you did not have to fight anyone for your parking spot. And if you keep your commuter pass, when you land a great space close to your classroom building, rejoice and be glad.

Or, in one further act of rebellion, you could ignore LUPD’s emails and avoid the East Campus Satellite parking lot at all costs until they pay us to park there.