You sit down in your first lecture of the day. As you fight sleep and search for a pen you hear the poorly-oiled door hinge screech across the room. People’s heads whip around and the poor soul who pushed the door hurries in and awkwardly shuffles to a seat. Who is this person? They could be a slacker or an over-sleeper, but more than likely they are the victim of the dilapidated parking situation at our university.
University representatives have described the parking situation as the result of a “transition year” for USC. However, when a student misses 20 minutes of a lecture because they couldn’t find a parking spot, they cannot tell the professor they were late because the university is transitioning.
However, according to parking services, this problem is improving. After no addition of spaces or decrease in cars on campus, there are 600 new spaces available in Blossom Street Garage, Bull Street Garage, Senate Street Garage and Athletic Village Garage through a series of site surveys that measured traffic patterns and parking site usage.
While this idea is all well and good, it’s hard to believe there is actually any more spaces when you actually go to park. This issue is particularly grating if you shell out between $340 and $380 a semester to be guaranteed a parking space.
Essentially, students are paying for services they aren’t receiving, and now the university says they can still sell more passes, depending solely on students leaving parking spaces during the day. Students cannot continue to pay hundreds of dollars just to hope someone else is leaving precisely when they need to get to class.
No matter what great construction may come in the future, students and faculty have paid to have a place to park every day this semester, and tomorrow they will still be searching for a spot. There has to be visible action to solve this problem, not just overbooking garages with the hope that enough people fail to show up every day.