To the Editor,
I’m writing about the RPI parking situation, which for me came to a head on Friday, August 30. I am a commuter student who lived on campus last year and had a North Lot permit from last year. According to the permit itself, it is “Void After 8/02.” I decided to park on-campus this week, while my permit was still valid … or so I thought. When I went to park there, a Public Safety officer stopped me and informed me that my permit expired on August 1, 2002, even though I didn’t have a problem the past four days, and even though it never indicates that on the permit. She said that I could either get a new permit or get a ticket. Frustrated and ten mi-nutes from class time, I decided to try to find street parking instead, and thus was late for my class.
This got me to thinking about the parking situation in general. A lack of planning on the part of the Institute leads them to tear down a parking lot without creating another one to replace it. To make matters worse, they convert not only the commuter parking in North Lot, but also the lot between Hall and Warren Halls, into Faculty/Staff lots. To make up for the lack of spaces on-campus, they eliminate freshmen cars on campus, and force off-campus students, which make up over 40 percent of the RPI student population, to park in the Field House and take a shuttle bus down to campus. As if the shuttle bus, which is a scaled-down school bus without the flashing red lights (it has the flashing yellow light) wasn’t bad enough, they insult us further with a plethora of open spaces in the faculty and staff lots that we aren’t allowed to park in. If we try, Public Safety officers, who for the most part have been transformed into Public Parking Attendants, stop us and threaten us with tickets if we don’t park somewhere else. Instead of patrolling parking lots, shouldn’t they be doing something more important, such as patrolling campus and preventing thefts and other crimes instead of simply reporting them in The Poly the following week and offering “tips” on how we can try to prevent them ourselves?
Instead, they sit there, rain or shine, making sure there are two spaces for every one faculty or staff vehicle that parks on campus. This has lead to a worse parking situation than last year, and as such, has forced commuter students to park in the Field House. And as a final insult, they make you pay to get a permit so you can park in a lot so far away from campus that you have to take a bus! I didn’t know RPI had adopted CDTA’s Park and Ride philosophy…then again, they utilized CDTA to shuttle relatives to the Field House for graduation last year…and to shuttle them back to campus when they ran out of room…but that’s another story.
Scott Hill
CSCI GRAD
