[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Stony Brook Campus Parking lots are crowded. The parking ticket officials will slap a yellow envelope on your dashboard as soon as you shut your car door. And parking in South P might as well be in Stony Brook’s neighboring town, South Setauket. But being that Stony Brook is a commuter campus, why is the parking such a nuisance?
I set out to figure out what the deal with Campus Parking is.
Hidden Parking Gems
There are six parking zones on campus, for the faculty, commuters, residents, and staff. Commuter students are meant to park in commuter zones, with green signs: North P, South P and Gym Road. A hidden gem is the Gym Road parking lot, by the Sports Complex. And probably any gym- folk,unlikeme,aremorefamiliarwiththis spot than I. But if you have early morning classes, drive round to this gem.
On any given weekday, I’ve seen that out of the 357 parking spaces in the Stadium parking lot, about a quarter are taken. The premium-permits cost $150 for the academic year, or $2 a day. At first, I was like forget paying that chunk of change. But I probably have paid about that amount of money in parking tickets in one semester regardless, so investing in a premium-parking permit could be a strategy in the war against SBU Parking
Enforcement. But why is this gigantic parking lot empty? James O’Connor, the director of Sustainability and Transportation Operations said there has been a 20 percent decrease in demand for stadium parking premium-permits. Win!
Many of the parking lots across campus have time slots where parking without a VIP permit is allowed. Resident, commuter and faculty lots are free to anyone after 4 p.m. While metered parking lots, which are meant for visitors only, O’Connor emphasized, are free to everyone after 7 p.m. Commuters park in metered parking anyway, and pay the $2 an hour, like my housemate Chloe Rappaport, who got a parking ticket while she was paying the meter. Parking enforcement, how do you sleep at night?
Use The “Useful” Campus Transportation
O’Connor said campus parking is going through metamorphosis. “We’ve seen an economic shift over the past couple of years that has changed the use of public transportation to fuel efficient ways,” he said. Stony Brook has added transportation alternatives for students to travel across the 1,039-acre campus with campus buses and a bike-sharing program that is put into effect this month.
The bike share program, which launches later this month, promotes a more environmentally friendly transportation on campus. There are four bike stations, totaling 50 bikes, at the SAC, West apartments and South P parking lot. The 50 bikes to 24,500 students ratio doesn’t sound like it’s going to be very effective, at all. By the way, the bike sharing is only free for the first hour of usage, and classes normally run for one hour and twenty minutes. This makes sense.
But nothing about the transportation on campus really makes brilliant sense. Commuter students are far too familiar with the crowded parking and inconvenient campus transportation on campus and especially the crowded express busses and long lines. “They need a better system,” said Chaucey Hoffman, a senior, who lives off campus. She wasn’t aware of the new bike-share program, but said in past semesters she has tried to ride a bike on campus, but a bike ride from the main campus to south campus takes longer than ten minutes, the normal transition time in between classes. “It’s all very inconvenient, especially the busses stopping at midnight,” she said.
But it isn’t only students who are frustrated. Professors and faculty tear their hair out and get slammed with parking tickets too. Sociology Professor
Jane Ely said the limited space in the parking garage is unreal, which is a pay-to- park area that is around $20 a month. “I have had to park in the handicap space a few times,” Ely said, although she does not have a handicap sticker and gets tickets. “I’m older and I’m not walking that far.”
Fighting Our Carbon Footprint
Ah, that new-aged, marketing term: Green. Energy-efficient vehicles, organic crops, reusable materials are efforts to reduce the human carbon footprint that is beginning to show it’s imprints on the Earth’s atmosphere and ocean temperatures. According to the American Marketing Association, the term “green” was first used for environmental marketing in 1975. But environmentally friendly products and conscious people
and businesses did not take off until the millennium. Now, corporations and college campus have made the switch to eco-friendly ways. And it looks like Stony Brook wants in too.
The Stony Brook campus buses run on biodiesel fuel, which is biodegradable. The bike-share program is a fuel-efficient way to cut down the Seawolf carbon footprint on campus. David McAvoym transportation fleet manager and director of Energy- Efficient Campus Transportation, said Stony Brook may very well to be a leader in “green” transportation for college campuses within the future.
If Stony Brook’s aspiration is to become a top “green” college campus, they’re going to have to revamp the entire campus, not have 50 fuel-efficient bikes and RecycleMania for two months out of the year.
