... based on a Jerry Johnson photo
Phenomenal Women Of The Web®
STATS F.A.Q. FRIENDS WISHLIST GEEKCAM PHOTOS
PROFILE MORE PROFILES PORTFOLIO FAN ART YAHOO GROUP
PUBLISHED POETRY LIVEJOURNAL
MANIPULATIONS CHAT CONTACT GUESTBOOK
PAST VERSIONS AWARDS FORTUNES EEDIOTS
LINK ME LOTM INTERWEBHELP OUT THIS SITE BY MAKING PURCHASES!
‘It’s my concrete, I paid for it!’
By Teresa Dickert
Opinion Editor
I have written an editorial based on living in the College Avenue apartments before, but here goes another. I know I am not alone in my issues with parking on campus, but I am one of 22 people that pay $125 for a parking spot that one can never be too sure of having.
Campus parking tickets start at $10. In the dead of winter, or even just in the brisk weather during the change of the seasons, a $10 reprimand simply is not high enough to defer a student from the wonderful convenience that is occupying my spot in the College Avenue parking lot.
To make a change for the better, I propose that campus safety raise the ticket charge, if not for all tickets, at least those in the College Avenue apartment parking lot. Oh, I can completely understand that other parking areas on campus are a smidgen cramped, and that raising the fee levied on those of us being creative and inventing our own parking spaces will only create more animosity. Still, I paid $125 for my spot, and I am never guaranteed its existence when I come home late at night. As winter approaches, this increasingly irritates me. Yes, I was in this apartment complex last year, and yes, it happened more than enough times to warrant this heartfelt rant.
I could have paid $70 to park in Otteson lots 9 and 11, but instead I paid $125. I can understand my spot being used in an emergency, but not because a fellow student lacks a spot to call their own, and was too lazy to shiver their way through the bitter cold in the middle of January. It is either my fellow student’s lack of class status (through the parking lottery) or their unwillingness to pay the extra $55, which caused this problem. It is not my problem, so why should I be the one on the receiving end? I am not a rich person (how many students at this college really are?), and that $55 could have paid for half a book or something.
What is more? When I return home from a wonderfully fulfilling night out on the Waukesha town to a full parking lot, I am forced to call Campus Safety and tell them to ticket these vehicles. I have already called twice this year, and the second time my call was ignored. No one ever came down to ticket that second time. When one loses their spot in this manner and calls his/her friend in Campus Safety, he/she is informed to park somewhere else for the night and that the offending car owners will be ticketed. Being the persistent person I am, I park around the corner and try my hardest to patiently wait to scoop up the spot of another, most likely paying, parking spot customer making their way out on the town.
In sum, we could make this problem much less substantial by raising the ticket prices for at least this specific lot. With a greater "scare" factor in terms of monetary punishment, fewer students are likely to steal my convenient $125 piece of concrete for 9 months in exchange for a ticket. That, my slothful friends, is something to think about.
