We’re sick of hearing about parking.
According to the University Office of Parking, Traffic and Transportation, 19,504 students commute to this campus every day. Currently, there are about 22,000 parking spots on campus, with around 27,000 permits given out. For commuting students, there is a choice to be made get a ticket and a possible tow or making it to class on time.
The Reveille’s editorial board doesn’t want to complain about parking, but what we do want to do is challenge the University to keep students more informed about parking changes and aware of the current parking situation students have to face on a daily basis.
The University has been taking away from student parking since West Campus Apartments opened in fall 2003, taking away half of the Hart Lot from commuters to give to residents.
Since WCA’s opening, former Hart Lot parkers have been forced to re-locate.
Many students turned to the Stadium lot, but when the renovations began on Tiger Stadium this semester, the University took away 75 percent of parking from the formerly all commuter lot and gave it to the renovators and the athletic administration building.
There is parking on LSU’s campus, well, at least the University seems to think so. It’s safety valve stands about 1.6 miles from the main campus buildings, the Vet school parking lot, where many students are forced to park because there are no more spots available.
Students who park at the Vet school are forced to either walk the long distance or catch a bus, which like the majority of bus systems on campus, isn’t very timely.
For students who generally aren’t very time conscious, parking at the Vet school and in similar places can affect their getting to class at all.
The reason LSU originally established commuter lots all over campus is because students often have a bulk of their classes in one general area (i.e. Business students in CEBA) and need to park in that area. By moving lots around, it also moves students and their schedules. A five minute walk from the CEBA lot to CEBA suddenly turns into a 30 minute bus ride all across campus and subsequently being late to accounting.
As the University continues to take away parking spots, they continue to tell people to go park in the Vet school lot. Eventually, though, that lot also will fill up and more and more students will be parking all the way out by the levee.
The parking problems of this campus are supposedly going to be solved by the Master Plan, which hopes to mold LSU into a completely pedestrian campus in the next 10 years.
However, with the Master Plan comes more construction. The 100 parking spots commuters lost in South Stadium this semester have had a big enough impact already. What are students going to do when it begins to build monstrosities such as parking garages?
If the University is going to continually inconvienience students, there needs to be a more efficient bus system that really does arrive every six to eight minutes. With a by-the-clock bus system, parking miles from campus wouldn’t be as bad. If the bus system can’t be fixed, the University needs to provide more parking closer to campus buildings for commuters, the largest percentage of student drivers.
Many campus organizations such as KLSU have taken the initiative to inform students of parking availability to make their trek to class a little easier. We don’t think the University has to send parking directors out every morning so students can find parking spots, but we do think the University could find a better way of informing the students about parking lot closures and making more parking available to students.