Spears and arrows

If parking on campus wasn’t bad enough, Georgia College & State University Public Safety in conjunction with the Milledgeville DOT are taking away more chances for students to park on or near campus.

Two 15-minute parking signs have just been put up directly in front of Chappell Hall on Clark Street. There is also one more post that does not have a sign placed on it yet. I placed a call to Public Safety to verify the placement of the signs, and they are not there as a result of the construction, rather they are permanent. The woman at Public Safety could not answer my questions, she wasn’t even aware of the change in parking outside Chappell Hall.

That means the loss of four or five parking spots to GC&SU students. That may not seem like a lot to public safety, but this will really affect students roaming the streets for 15 to 20 minutes looking for spots each
day.

More parking changes have occurred downtown as well. All-day parking spots downtown have now been changed to two-hour parking spots. I understand that this is probably to help the flow of customers in downtown shops and restaurants, but once again, it takes away potential parking spots for GC&SU students.

Even though articles have been written and surveys filled out designating parking as the biggest problem on GC&SU’s campus, nothing has really been done to correct the problem. Students are doing their part; using the shuttle, carpooling and walking longer distances to get to class, but parking is still a problem. So why would the ‘powers that be’ take away more parking spots?

Changing the current parking will benefit GC&SU’s campus, for public safety that is. More students are going to be forced to park illegally in order to find a space and get to class on time. That means, of course, more parking tickets and more money that public safety will be making each year.

I know that there are several occasions where I have to run down to “The Colonnade” office for five or ten minutes at night. Instead of spending 20 minutes looking for parking, I hunt for the closest available spot, even if it is an illegal one. The amount of time spent looking for a parking space doesn’t equal the amount of time that I am on campus. I have been lucky enough to not receive a parking ticket, but I know several other students who have not been as lucky.

As a student, you start to wonder what public safety is doing. Typically, they should be there to help correct the parking problem; so far all they have done is made it worse. That is one of the reasons why I did not pay for a parking permit this year. I did not want to contribute to the amount of money that they were already taking away from students.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Oct 30 2002. Filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry