Put up a Parking Lot!

 Jessica Troxell

                                                            Put up a Parking Lot

            When deciding to go to college there are a lot of factors that people take into account tuition cost, campus life, education, but one factor that a majority of people fail to take into account (including Stonehill College) is parking. There are nine parking lots on campus for students: Duffy (only on the weekends), Commuter lot, Lot 17, Boland, Commons lot, Heights, Villa, Du Lac, and the Sem. While at first glance this may seem like a lot of areas to park in actuality the parking at a majority of these places is very limited and almost always full. It is because of this that students are forced to park in Lot 17. Lot 17 is the largest parking lot on campus and offers several rows for both residential students and commuter students but this lot is not close to any academic buildings and with all of the cars on campus to get a spot you will most likely have to park on the edges on the lot which is even further from academic buildings. Making it a horrible place to park if you are running late to class.

 

The parking on this campus is hard enough as is but it gets even worse when you take into account the bad parkers on campus. Bad parking can be pretty annoying and frustrating the worst in my opinion is when you find a space and yet your car cannot fit into it because the person next to you parked over the line

. But nothing is more annoying than the people who park their cars in a smaller lot like the Heights or Du Lac and never move their cars. If Stonehill had better parking on campus and Lot 17 wasn't so out of the way maybe this wouldn't be as big of an issue. But those students who regularly drive their cars on campus can understand how annoying it is to make the trek up to lot 17 only to have to move your car in less than a day.

Something needs to be done about this parking issue and it doesnt seem like Stonehill sees this as an issue for students at all.

Did you know that there is no cap on the amount of parking passes that Stonehill issues on campus each year? So in theory, if the class sizes keep growing then there will be nowhere left to park eventually and what will Stonehill do when that happens? Ticket you for not being parked in the correct spaces. Currently, Stonehill had 1220 of residential parking spots on campus 162 of commuter spots on campus and has given out 1183 of residential passes and 280 of commuter spaces on campus. The bottom line is there are way too many cars on campus and something needs to be done to help solve this issue. Either Stonehill needs to decrease the number of parking permits on campus or they build a new parking lot.