If you thought your free parking permit meant the parking situation on campus would be easy, you were wrong. Over the past week, the arrival of the largest freshman class ever coupled with returning students, faculty and staff has swelled the number of people — and cars — on campus. Even as Housing and Residence Life attempts to find space for all of the students who want to live on campus, the creative measures they undertake will have no effect on the limited parking capacity the Malibu campus has to offer.
Residents living in Drescher and George Page are the least inconvenienced because of their remoteness on the edges of campus, but the Rho and Upsilon parking lots must be shared by all residents living in freshman dorms, the Lovernich apartments and the overflow from the microscopic Towers parking lot.
What are students supposed to do, though? Everyone commuting to campus needs somewhere to leave their car for as long as they will be here, and those of us who live on campus need a way to get off campus and purchase groceries and other needed supplies, or at least to escape the Pepperdine bubble for a short while with a trip to Santa Monica or some other destination. In the short-term, at least, it looks as if we will just have to suck it up and deal with the challenge of driving halfway around campus to park at the bottom of a hill. The administration predicted rising enrollment and the multi-year Campus Life Project is intended to alleviate the overpopulation, but in the meantime we will have to brave the long walk uphill to wherever we are going. At least it will give us some exercise beyond dragging ourselves to the top of the CCB stairs.
The Campus Life Project aims to add 796 more parking spaces on campus, but the long time spent planning the project and getting it approved is a testament to the difficulty of any sort of new construction on campus. Unfortunately, construction is the only long-term solution to the parking situation unless the student population were to be reduced, as commuters already fill up all available street-side parking and the few remaining lots around campus that aren’t barred from access by gates.
At the end of the day, it is important that we all remember to be civil and perhaps willing to walk a bit farther on campus than we would have otherwise done to make it through this year; the problem isn’t going away, but then again, neither are we.
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Follow Patrick Rear on Twitter: @pgrear92
