Commuter Parking Dilemma
...rder to escape receiving a fine while other resident students don’t even bother going through all the trouble of removing their stickers. Recently, as I sat in one of my classes, I overheard two resident students talking about the parking situation. The one resident student lives in the Silver dormitory which happens to be relatively close to the commuter parking lot. She was telling her friend that it’s a hassle to have to walk all the way to the resident parking lot and that it’s much easier to just park in the commuter parking lot. She said that if you park in the back corner of the parking lot by backing your car into the parking space, then the Safety Patrol officer doesn’t bother looking at the parking permit sticker. She continued to brag about how she parks her car in the commuter parking lot all the time and has yet to receive a ticket. In an interview with a commuter student, she commented, “It’s frustrating to be driving through the parking lot and not be able to find a space only to see about five or six spaces that are filled by resident students’ cars.” If Lebanon Valley College personnel were to take drastic measures in solving this problem, they could put up an access control post at the entrance of the commuter parking lot. There are a couple of ways that the access control post could be utilized. One way would be to hire a couple of people, who will work in shifts, to monitor the cars that come into the parking lot. On the weekends, the commuter parking lot would not need to be monitored since it would not get much use by commuters during that time. Visitors would be issued a different type of parking permit upon entering the parking lot. The access control post would be beneficial to the campus because additional jobs would be created. Another way that the access control post could monitor the cars that are parking in the commuter parking lot would be to design a system that makes the drivers swipe their student identification cards. If this was the circumstance, then there wouldn’t be a need to have a student work in the access control post. Although, there would need to be an alternative for the visitors who wish to park there due to the fact that they don’t possess identification cards. In that case, visitors would then be provided with a separate parking lot. In order to create a new parking lot for visitors, the college would need to find space, funding, and time to build it. If all of that could be accomplished, then creating a visitor parking lot would make it a lot easier for security officers to find and ticket cars that are parked where they aren’t supposed to park. In the event that a visitor parking lot is built, and the commuter parking lot becomes strictly for commuters, then there would be no need for an access control post or a place to swipe identification cards. Another possibility would be to issue visitor parking passes. The visitors would be burdened in the sense that they would have to somehow acquire a visitor parking pass. They would have to either go to a building, such as the Mund College Center, and sign in or get a pass from a previous mentioned solution, which would concern the acce...