But car registration, parking space (at home and everywhere you go), and gas prices are more expensive in larger cities. I’m originally from Tokyo, and there it’s unthinkable that someone can afford to own a car, but cannot afford a good apartment.
Then again, I guess if you’re living with your parents, your parents are essentially paying for the parking space at home…
I went to UF for a couple of years before transferring to ECU. Both had pretty bad parking (see above), but I stumbled onto a solution that worked for me when I bought a small pickup truck. I would add 10 minutes to my travel time, throw my bike in the back of the truck, park off campus and bike the final 1-2 miles to class. It really cut down on my parking stress and saved me a few bucks by letting me buy the cheapest parking permits. Of course, this only works in fair-weather campuses, but I’d do it again if I had to.
Spazcat, the reason I bought the pickup was the big parking lot down by the gym flooded one year, submerging half the cars up to the windows. This was back in '96, I think. Good times…
The parking at my school isn’t too terrible - if I get to campus half an hour early I can usually find a space. The biggest problem is that the campus is right in the middle of downtown and traffic is a nightmare almost any time of day. My commute can vary from 25 minutes to 2 hours. So this semester I tried to save myself a little hassle (and potentially gas money) and looked into commuting by bus. If I took the bus it would take me 3 and half hours to get to school in the mornings and 4 and half hours to get home. That’s assuming that the buses run on schedule, which hardly ever happens. All you people with decent public transportation should count yourselves very lucky indeed.
One year? That thing floods EVERY year! Except this year because of the drought, but there’s still two and a half months yet.
If you want to see real flooding, I can scan in my pictures of Floyd. They built a new science and technology building where the deepest water was. :smack:
I did this when I wt to IUPUI (Indianapolis), but it was necessary for about the first 2 months of the fall semester. Enough freshmen would drop out by Halloween that you could find a spot at 11 AM the rest of the year.
I just did some reading on Hurricane Floyd and its effects on ECU in '99. It said " Normally, a knee-deep stream called Green Mill Run meanders through the campus. It carries storm water run-off from the campus and the City of Greenville. That small stream turned into a river 300 yards wide flowing at 6-8 knots." That’s the stream that always floods the lot we’re talking about. They should put up signs or something. As I recall, the campus wasn’t held liable for all the flooded cars in '96. Are there any signs warning of flooding?
I’m not sure you understand what it costs to drive a car in America. Car registration costs are between $30 and $100 for two years. Parking is free (some colleges charge for passes, but not all) in almost all places in the suburbs and at most a few bucks a day in cities. Gas prices are averaging around $3 a gallon everywhere and because cars are so required in America it becomes an accepted part of the car.
All told, this probably works out to probably $75-$100 a month.
On the other hand, apartments/dorms can cost hundreds of dollars on the low end, with more expensive areas requiring even more.
The nice thing about Laurentian was that I could commute by canoe in the summer and commute by skiis in the winter. I only needed a car during ice-in and ice-out. There was lots of free parking on campus.
I usually walked or biked at Waterloo until the snow came, and I usually biked at Western until the snow came. Both had adequate parking at low cost (although Western did not consider law to be a graduate degree, so we had to park further away than other grad students).
The University of Toronto, however, was a nightmare for commuting – one and a half to two hours each way, be it by car or by bus and train and subway. Forget about parking on campus – the campus is not differentiated from the city. Parking on a residential street half an hour’s walk from campus was the norm, although on really cold days and on nights when class went past midnight (cinema classes often went into the wee hours), I’d break open the piggy bank to pay for a spot on or close to campus – usually under $10 a day, but that was about thirty years ago. I tried living in a dorm there for a year, but life in a zoo is not for me. Living off campus in a frat was good, except that we ended up going for a winter without electricity, heat, water, windows, interior doors and most interior walls, etc. In addition to whatever I may have learned in classes that year, the one tremendously valuable lesson I still recall is “Get the right building permit, dumbass!”
Presently, the local university, Lakehead, has cut a deal so that all students receive a bus pass as part of what they get for their compulsory student union dues. Needless to say, that has pissed off a lot of people who do not live on or close to bus routes, or who have late hours. The last time I took a bus, the skid sitting beside me pissed himself.
Actually I own two cars here in America.
Let’s say you buy a $4000 used car, spend $400/year on maintenance/repairs, and maybe it’ll get you through to the end of college. That’s $117/month already. Insurance for me is on the order of $50 per month, but I’m guessing it’s at least $80 for a college student. If you live too far to bike to class, you probably burn at least 1/2 gallon of gas per day, so that’s $45/month. Even if you manage to sell the car after 4 years for $2000, your car cost you $200/month.
OK, so I suppose you can’t get a room for $200/month even with a roommate, but it goes a long way towards it. And I think the above estimate is on the low end. Most cars I see on the college campus are newer and better than my $4000 used car.
I certainly don’t think this is the norm for every college student in America, but at my school almost every kid has their first car (and maybe even their second) bought for them by their parents. Many parents pay insurance and maintenance on their kids’ cars as well. A lot of my friends didn’t learn the true cost of automobile ownership until they were well out of college.
That’s nice. pats head I was not allowed to go away to school for the first two years. My parents, let their precious daughter out of their sight? Hell no…I might have had gasp sex.
Heh. Not like they could stop me.
Anyway. I am so on board with these rants. Let me tell you the doozy. My first two years I went to a local State school. It didn’t have enough parking to start with, and percentage-wise. it had more spots for the residents than the commuters. Lemme 'splain.
If there were 10 resident students and 5 commuters, they might have 8 resident-only spots, and ONE commuter spot. That’s right, they had about a fifth as many commuter spots as they needed.
Let me repeat that. They deliberately gave out less COMMUTER spots.
screams and clutches hair
Una Person, your story is making me want to scream, too. When I think of how many things were taken away from all of the other organizations because “the sports team needs it” it still makes me mad.
Not the school’s fault, is it?
Or perhaps you should think outside the box of “every college student has no job and lives off of scholarships, is 18 years old, and is still completely dependent on their family/parents”. I happen to work 15 miles from where I live, and an additional 30 miles from where I go to school. I must do this because the degree I’m pursuing isn’t offered at any closer campus. But by your reasoning, I should quit complaining and just change my major to something closer to my house, get a worse paying job on-campus because I’ll be making up the difference by not commuting, etc. etc.
You’re focusing on the cost of owning and operating a car, which is really not related to the complaint at hand. A college has X number of students. X-Y (number of students who live on-campus) will be expected to have to use a parking place at any given time. X-4000 happens to be the number of parking spaces available for students. This is poor planning on the part of the college, not poor planning on the part of students for having the audacity of owning a car :rolleyes:
ETA: I don’t know where you went to school, but “reasonably priced apartments nearby” is a fucking joke. You can be expected to pay 40-70% more for an apartment nearby school than by commuting.
The university that I have recently been attending is clearly unusual. It has lots of parking and on the occasions that I’ve driven there I’ve never had any trouble getting a space. The annual parking fee is only $130.
Well, if work and school are 15 miles in opposite directions, and if you go to both 5 times a day, that’s 1200 miles per month. You probably spend over $40 per week on gas, and spend at least 10 hours per week sitting in your car. It still amazes me that people defend this lifestyle with such passion. If that’s what you want, go ahead, but realize that you’re choosing to live a life dependent on your car. And the school parking problem is a consequences of your choice. Along with traffic delays, car accidents, road rage, and all other problems caused by cars.
Actually, I don’t go to both 5 times a week, I do not spend that much on gas, and I am aware of the potential benefits if I was able to not drive. However, I haven’t got the luxury of having a schedule that’s flexible enough for me to be able to catch the bus or walk everywhere. Nor am I able to uproot my life, switch jobs, find a new place to live, move across the Bay, and plop down 3 blocks from campus. Just because something would be more convenient to do doesn’t mean it’s always prudent or even possible to do. I’d say the majority of students are like that. Hell, the vast majority of people are like that. It’s fantastic that while you lived in Tokyo, a place that is designed in a way that is much more conducive to pedestrians and designed in a way that actively discourages automobile use, you were able to do just that.
Most of our cities and lives are just not that way. To say that a situation that (roughly) 75% of students are in is a choice and we are in the wrong for the fact that an American university hasn’t managed to adapt to an American way of life is ridiculous. People commute by car. Universities have the exact figures of what percentage of students will be attending campus and utilizing on-campus housing. Failing to provide an adequate parking situation for the majority of students who do not is poor-planning on their part.
I currently live in Alabama and bike to work. I went to college in Boston and never needed a car.
Why do you think that is? It’s because of people like you, who feel they are entitled to a parking space everywhere they go. This forces buildings to be further apart to provide room for roads and parking spaces. Which is why the residential areas are so far from your work and school.
Like I said, my schedule doesn’t allow me to do that. I’m not just speaking for myself either. I just think it’s ridiculous to assert that a problem of not providing parking for schools that draw a lot of commuter students is somehow the fault of the students who have to commute. You can make it a big hippie fuss about it and say that we’re all terrible people for using cars, but you can go to hell. I’m not trying to get them to make an exception for a lifestyle that goes against the grain. We’re requesting that they do what nearly every institution in the entire country does, create a situation that enables people to come to their location in a manageable way.
Sure, cars are bad, road rage and all that. You’re missing the point. Or you’re intentionally obfuscating it so that you can say “Look, I did it, and it’s not all that hard if you really try, so just ditch your cars and then you wouldn’t have to bitch about parking.”
I dunno, I guess we’re just coming at it from two different lifestyles. But, I just figure that if you’re taking that much of my money every semester, you might find it considerate to enable me, a driving, commuting student, to attend class in a timely manner. YMMV.
Also, I am not one of those people who believes they are entitled to a parking place wherever I go. I frequently walk places when I can, and when it’s not prohibitively rainy or hot. I do, however, expect that when I am crossing a bridge to get to school, I have a place to put my car.
You knew the constraints you place over your own life, and you presumably understood the parking conditions at the school before you enrolled. I would say it’s a problem you chose to face, not something arbitrarily imposed on you out of thin air.
Look, I already admitted to owning two cars, and I use them sparingly but regularly. But if I go to an event and have trouble finding parking space, I at least understand it’s because I chose to drive there at that time, and try not to blame the organizers for providing insufficient parking.
The University of Alabama has a plan to go greener/pedestrian in the next year (if they haven’t already- I’ve been gone from there for about a year) which involves losing about 200 prime parking spaces in front of the main library (Gorgas) and the surrounding class buildings and museums. This resulted in a lot of “green is good… but FUCK!”
Some students were at first a bit “nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nah-nah” about it with a “poor you, now you have to walk half a mile like we do”, until it occurred to them that “Dude- you used to walk half-a-mile- when the pedestrian only green is opened, you’ll be walking a mile because the faculty will be getting your spaces.” When I was a student there I lived a little over a mile from class and walked more often than I drove because it was about the same timewise looking for a space v. walking.
What always made me and other faculty laugh at the small universities where I worked in Georgia was the number of whiney editorials and student kvetching (including “why I’m late for class”) about the parking space shortage. The furthest parking space from class was perhaps a quarter mile, half-again shorter than the nearest space at the research universities we’d attended.