For some unknown reason, the metered parking situation on campus makes me beyond frustrated.
To begin, I really and truly do not see the point, especially in residential lots.
I understand it may be intended to help people’s parents, grandparents, and other visitors have closer parking to the building, but that’s completely negated by their mobile paymet system.
The expectation on someone to download an app, or wrestle with the text system to park their car and see their children is beyond me.
If your grandparents are anything like mine, they’ll give up, go park in the further visitor lots, and put themselves through the strain of walking across campus.
The walk may be fine for most college students, but for those with disabilities, chronic illness, or simply the elderly, it can be quite an undertaking.
My parent visited campus recently, and neither the app nor the text-messaging
system functioned properly, it turned what should have been a laid-back family visit into a tense game of checking for a parking ticket every five minutes.
The implimentation of an electronic system in addition to a physical meter would be fine, and make that parking more accesible to visitors, however, the removal of physical meters is just asking for trouble.
Yes, vehicles with handicap permits are allowed to park for free at metered spaces, but not everyone who needs a handicap permit has one. My grandfather uses a cane and dosen’t do well walking long distances, but still dosen’t have one.
This also dosen’t account for people with strollers, small children, or other such needs who may perfer closer parking to accomodate these needs. Sidewalks are slick, and someone who is pregnant could fall and seriously injure themselves and their baby when made to treck across campus because the electronic meter system is too much of a hassle.
If Parking Services truly intended to use this metered system to ensure closer parking for visitors, they could add a type of visitors pass for the day, allowing those who need accomodative parking who may not have a handicap pass to park freely in the metered spots.
By allowing day visitors to request a metered pass, the university could provide better accomodations for a more broad spectrum of needs and circumstances, while not missing revenue because, frankly, how much are they really making on the metered parking spaces?
If they felt so strongly about it, they could disallow said passes to current SVSU students to help ensure that the parking spaces are still avaliable to visitors.
Overall, many aspects of SVSU’s parking policies are downright strange to me, and I find them to be somewhat predatory.
I understand to an extent enforcing that freshman stay in the freshman lot, but upperclassmen lots, such as Pine Grove and UV lots, should be interchangable so students who may not want to walk can more easily visit their friends across campus. The lots are on opposite sides of campus so people parking in each other’s lots just to park there in that case would be rare.
In conclusion, I feel that parking policies on campus do more harm than good sometimes, and can’t be explained by anything other than a source of revenue.
The metered parking on campus is just one example, the way the system works, I feel it does more harm than good.
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