“Oh my God I only have twenty minutes to get to school!” This exclamation, or one with even more colorful language, is something I can commonly be heard uttering on
most mornings. I only live about 7 miles from school, so I usually arrive with a good minute to spare. The next task is turning down my Rick Ross and focusing on finding a parking spot so I’m not that late. That should be easy right?
In the spring and fall months, finding parking is really not that difficult and a short walk is nothing to complain about when the weather is pleasant. Though I can wish for year round tropical weather, all that daydreaming is making me late for class. So when the leaves start falling off the trees and you can feel a bite in the air, you know that the winter parking bans are coming. After a large snowfall, parking on the street is a dream that’s not coming true. The parking lots fill up rapidly, and extra lots are opened to provide some minimal relief. However those lots close at 6:00PM so anyone with a 6:15 night class is again relegated to circling around campus wasting their $3.77-a-gallon gas. As the snow begins to melt, street parking opens up. However there are so few spaces that one is always risking a parking ticket that will lighten your wallet for the equivalent of about 10 gallons of that gas.
This doesn’t only affect the people of Becker. In South Boston, it has become somewhat of a tradition for people to “save” their parking spaces with objects like lawn chairs, doors and even old wooden closets. Just last week, after the major blizzard, the Mayor notified people that if they did not remove their place holders by Thursday February 14th at 6PM, the city would forcibly take them. Clearly these people don’t have the right to mark city property as their own, but these bans and the lack of parking gives them little choice in the matter. This is a nightmare for people who live there, and it seems outrageously unfair to give people parking tickets for parking in front of their own homes. In such highly populated areas these problems are unavoidable, but the longer you have to contend with them the smoother the process becomes. If only to save the reader from another rant, the spring cannot come any faster!
Jesse Quigley; Staff Writer
i will never understand what it’s like to own a car. i have enough problems with my feet in the snow.