by Ivanhoe
A&E Editor

Those who assume that carpooling to Shoreline Community College would help alleviate the hassle of parking on campus are dead wrong.

I made that assumption last year, when my roommate and I decided to ride together. The convenience and expense of driving beat taking the bus, and using my fuel-efficient Toyota to transport two bodies was much friendlier to the environment than taking two cars for the same purpose.

Surely, the college would also attempt to mitigate its parking woes by encouraging carpooling, right? Well, let’s look at their current “incentive.”

Students wishing to carpool must apply to Safety & Security together before receiving a carpool pass. Unlike the regular daytime student pass, which costs $25, the carpool pass is free. But this “free” pass has some conditions:

• Carpoolers may only park in the Greenwood Lot and trudge up 139 stairs before reaching the lower level of the library, or park in the Sears Lot, several blocks away from campus, and take the shuttle to campus, which runs until 5:30 p.m.
  
• At least two students must be in the vehicle when the car is parked, otherwise you can be ticketed. This means that you cannot drop your passenger off near campus and then park.
  
• The car must be parked between 7 a.m. and noon. Carpoolers who arrive between noon and 4 p.m. must still pay $25 for a quarterly pass, and carpoolers who arrive later must pay $10.
  
• Students must carpool at least twice a week.

Because my roommate and I could not fulfill these requirements, I had to buy a quarterly pass anyway. My chronically ill passenger had difficulty walking up the stairs every day from the Greenwood Lot, and since I also worked on campus in the evenings, I could not leave my car at Sears unless I wanted to walk all the way out there after dark or pay for parking if I moved my car closer to the campus later in the day.

Safety & Security verified that their policy has not changed since last year, and that a total of 13 carpool passes were given out last quarter. Sgt. Becky Gibler explained in an e-mail that carpoolers used to have prime parking spots up near campus. Prior to the change in 2002, 300 carpool permits were given out each quarter.

“One of the reasons we changed the carpool system is because we had to spend numerous hours each day monitoring the various carpool lots,” she said. “We received student complaints every day because carpoolers were violating the policy and parking alone or without their permits.”

Gibler found a correlation between the amount of effort it took to enforce carpool parking during peak hours and the number of car prowls reported on campus. In 2000, the number of car prowls reported was 22.

“When we took away the reserved spaces for carpoolers and spent more time doing general patrol, that number dropped to 4.”

With a 95% drop in the number of carpool passes given out, it sounds to me like there was no compromise. I think the choice between carpooling or security is a false dichotomy. Last year, my own car was broken into while I was parked in the Greenwood Lot. Could a better balance have been achieved?

Nowadays, carpooling to campus every day of the quarter saves you less than 50¢ a day, and in return you get a lousy parking spot.

I have no intention of discouraging people from carpooling. In fact, I encourage it greatly. But you may choose to split the difference on a quarterly pass and park nearer to campus, as I did, than waste your energy filling out the paperwork to get the privilege of parking so far away from campus.

With parking as bad as it is, not to mention global climate change and other environmental issues, we need to get more than 25 people carpooling every quarter. Safety & Security should consider allocating 50 prime parking spots close to campus for people who carpool or whose vehicles get better than 40 miles to the gallon. Students could pay for these parking spots, just like non-carpoolers, and parking fees could even be increased to help subsidize bus passes for students who take the bus every day.

In the meantime, kudos to the 12 parties who are using carpool passes this quarter.