Ryan NorrisImagine limping around campus after having surgery and the first time you decide to venture out and grab some things at CVS, you get stuck parking at the Dixon Center lot.
This situation happened to me not but a few days ago. Luckily I was able to get an escort from Public Safety back to my house because of the rain and my inability to walk back on my own. On my ride back to my house that night, I pointed out five to 10 cars still parked on Residential Blvd. that I knew were freshman cars.
Public Safety decided over the summer where students, both residents and commuters, were allowed to park throughout the year. Resident upperclassmen are permitted to park on Residential Blvd., and if there are no other parking spaces, then they are told to park in the Dixon lot. Commuters are permitted to park in the Founders/Widener Center parking lot.
However, during the first week of classes, cars were parked along Residential Blvd. – not only in normal parking spots, but also along the grass. These cars were not only the cars of upperclassmen, but freshmen as well. It is hard enough to find a parking spot with just upperclassmen cars on campus, and so the rules of freshmen not having their cars here on campus should be strictly enforced. In my opinion, I had to wait until I was a second year student to have my car here, and so should everyone else. It is a chance that the freshmen are taking, but at the same time this “chance” is causing a hassle for the upperclassmen.
If you are a freshman reading this and wondering how else you are supposed to get around if you don’t have a car, there is a free shuttle service. This service is provided by the school and takes students to the mall, Wawa and the train station.
Another issue I have with parking is the handicapped spots for non-handicapped accessible places. Take the house I live in for example, there are two parking spots in the driveway and then one handicapped spot, yet the house is not handicap accessible. There is a step into the house, but even if that step was not there, and a handicapped student wanted to live and park here, they would be able to live in one of three rooms with no access to the kitchen, laundry room or handicapped bathroom. I’m not trying to downsize the importance of having handicapped spots, but I think they need to be positioned better. Of course I would have loved to have used the handicapped parking spot that night that I needed a place to park, but it was taken due to the lack of other parking spaces on campus.
The freshmen on this campus need to realize that rules are rules and they need to be respected.
Posted to the web by Ryan Norris
