Students Must Fight For Parking

Students marched in protest with each new chapter in the tuition increase saga of the 1999-2000 academic year. Now they are threatened with the loss, not of more money, but of something almost as precious: parking spaces.

Last Wednesday, University officials announced that in the near future, the number of on-campus parking spaces for students living in residence halls will drop from 480 to zero.

If a protest against this decision does materialize, you can count on seeing me there. While I have full confidence in this University's leaders, the fact remains that they need to find a better alternative than eliminating resident student parking.

Some of the spaces will be lost because of planned construction projects, while others will go to faculty and staff, some of whom have been waiting as many as 15 years for a parking space, Provost Robert Shelton said last week.

Shelton referred to the few spaces now available to resident students as "a luxury that we can no longer afford."

While anyone would agree with him that parking is a problem on campus, many students will take issue with calling student spaces a luxury. True, employees definitely need somewhere to park. As Shelton pointed out, their research and other duties often make other options, like buses, impossible.

But students are just as much a part of UNC as its employees, and many experience the same scheduling difficulties as professors.

At this point a difficult problem arises. Logically, with the ever-decreasing number of spaces available, it is physically impossible to give on-campus parking to everyone whom I've just said deserves it.

But eliminating resident students' spaces is not the best solution.

The student population turns over every four years, but that does not make it any less important for students to have at least a chance at a decent parking space while they are here.

Many resident students who want one, of course, never get on-campus parking as it is. Those students are just like the employees who cannot park on campus. Right now, people who need to park on campus are students and employees, and some of those people are able to do so. Under the new plan, only one of the groups needing parking will even have a chance of actually getting it.

That will be very nice for those employees who gain an on-campus parking space -- and it's my guess that even without resident student spaces not everyone will -- but, sadly, it would not be a particularly fair or just system.

The present system, which, if it denies people a space for 15 years certainly is not perfectly fair either, at least does not discriminate against any particular group.

It might seem like it would have been better if planners had kept parking for students and employees as a higher priority throughout the process of planning future campus construction. But even if doing it over again were an option, the concerns that took priority over parking would continue to do so.

In the end, there is probably no perfect solution to the parking problem. There are probably options that improve on the current setup, though, and without eliminating on-campus parking as an option for students.

To start with, for example, some of those employees who have been waiting for years should be put on a rotation for parking with employees who have had parking for years.

The same idea could be applied to students. I've never been able to get a space on campus myself, but if I had one I'd think it only right and just that I trade with someone in the PR lot every semester or every month or some such more equitable plan.

The provost and other officials, rather than using students to absorb the problem of limited parking, should put a little more thought into creative ways of allowing as many people as possible -- students and staff alike -- access to those on-campus spots.

Until discovery of those alternatives makes it possible for some resident students to keep on-campus spots, fellow students, I'm counting on you for that protest.

Columnist Geoff Wessel can be reached at vrooom@email.unc.edu.