by Laura Taylor
Over the years I have heard many grumblings about the parking situation here at Centre. I have witnessed drivers slowly go down lines of parking, the driver hopeful, keeping their head on a swivel, despite their slim chances of finding a parking space remotely close by on a Monday night. More recently, I have heard complaints that go beyond mumbles and grumbles. Many students have started suggesting different solutions for their troubles that require campus-wide changes. However, I think that the frustration about parking is out of temporary annoyance, rather than a legitimate issue; there are bigger things that we should be using our collective power as a student body to fix.
I, too, find myself praying to the Centre gods that more parking be built when I walk from my car to my residence hall after an unsuccessful search for a parking spot. I have read many Yik Yaks about how far students are forced to walk after what should have been a quick trip to Walmart. I have overheard different ideas for how to fix this supposed problem. While I have complete and total empathy for these students, I want to use this as an opportunity to make some points that may seem obvious, but that I feel have gotten lost in hazes of vexation.
I can’t help but think that it could be worse; it could be so much worse. Anyone who has spent any significant amount of time on a large college campus knows how much worse it could be. Many places have parking lots that could dwarf all of ours combined, and students still cannot find a spot. And even if they do, they have to walk several miles to get back to where they live. I hate to say it, but the walk from Fifth Street to Northside is not an arduous enough journey to warrant a parking uprising. However, I am very aware that everything in life is relative, so I am not in any way encouraging students to temper their annoyance as they trudge onward. A notable story that I feel will help put things into perspective for Centre students is one from the University of Georgia in the summer of 2023. The unprecedented number of students caused a shortage of parking passes, leaving students suddenly unable to bring their cars to campus with less than a month’s notice. To remedy this, one student honed their acting skills and called the school crying begging about her mental health and family life in order to obtain a parking pass. After this succeeded, their peers followed suit and soon the offices were flooded with phone calls with crying students on the other end. In my experience, I have never had to call Centre College and fabricate a sob story in order to register my car. While the fee is something of a nuisance, my problems pale in comparison to those of the students at big schools with thousands of students unable to park on their campus. All of this is to say: I am counting my blessings.
At this time, I want to look at some of the proposed solutions to this problem and share some of the advantages and drawbacks of each. Many colleges do not allow first year students to bring their cars to campus, and there have been conversations about how this would work at Centre. There are generally two cases where this policy is implemented. In some, the town or city in which the college is located is walkable enough for first year students to still feel as though they have agency while not taking up parking spaces on campus. In other cases, the college and the city simply do not have enough parking spaces to possibly accommodate the number of first year students. When evaluating whether this policy (or one like it) could work at Centre, there are a couple things to look at. Firstly, Centre is a school in which a car is not required to travel from one end of campus to the other. Additionally, downtown Danville is incredibly walkable when students want to get out of the bubble of campus. However, I am going to speak as an out-of-state student for a moment. Danville is not conveniently located near an airport, and being able to drive makes packing and moving a thousand times easier. I also have a single parent who works full time and is most busy during the beginning of fall and the end of spring, which does not make it feasible for her to drop me off at school and then leave me carless. Shuttles to the airport for breaks are nice, however oftentimes my plans are not finalized before the deadline to sign up. Having a car on campus gives me some peace of mind when it comes to traveling. All of this being said, once my car is here, it often sits undriven for weeks. With some planning ahead and some compromise, I could feasibly live here without a car for a year. All four years would be a bit of a stretch. I’m afraid I do not have a definite answer on this topic. The most effective solution that I can think of that would make the least amount of people mad is to tell students and families that it is strongly encouraged for students not to bring their cars to campus. This would hopefully allow people to evaluate their situation and plan accordingly.
Briefly, in passing, I heard a proposed solution to the supposed parking problem which, while it likely does not have any backing, has stayed with me long enough for me to deem it important enough to bring up in this article. A few students have whipped up an idea to make the parking garage downtown an official Centre parking lot. I’m certain that anyone reading this is smart enough to understand why using a hospital parking lot that is further from campus than any of the parking lots Centre currently has will not quell students’ frustrations about having to walk long distances from their cars to their residence halls, so I will not bore anyone with any of that. Instead, I want to remind students that, while Centre seems like the axis around which Danville revolves, further encroachment on the community should not be our go-to solution. For those who do not know, there are several examples of this happening over the years. For example, the place where the baseball fields are located used to be an entire neighborhood with local businesses like the Car Store of Kentucky. The construction of the baseball fields created a dead end on the main road of that neighborhood which caused most places to go out of business, causing the community in that area to slowly disappear. This is only one example of many and we should not allow something like this to keep happening due to a mild inconvenience. We are lucky to go to this school for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that we have to walk ten minutes to our cars at the absolute maximum.
I want to end this on a more positive note that looks towards the future. As I alluded to earlier, there are bigger issues that we could be tackling than parking, like accessibility, housing, and more. As educated individuals living in one square mile of one another, we have a lot more power than we think. We have the ability to communicate and share ideas with one another every single day, which is far more unusual than it seems from our vantage point right now. Last year, Centre students held a walkathon to bring awareness to the campus’s lack of accessibility. We do not have to stop at Centre’s campus. If we took this collective power outside of the Centre bubble and out into the community to tackle an issue like homelessness or food insecurity, we could do a lot of good. Parking seems like a waste of our energy when compared to what we are capable of. For now, I suggest keeping some good walking shoes in your car on weekdays in case you are unlucky enough to find yourself in the back of the JVAC parking lot.