Art By Samantha Miller
Oh, how we’ve missed you, Pepperdine. The ocean views. The friendly people. The gloriously delicious Waves Cafe salad bar.
You always find a way to make parking so accessible and easy and fun. Classic Pepp.
You built Seaside (nice) and got rid of 200 parking spaces in the process (oops). You put a COVID-19 testing site (nice) right in the middle of Rho parking lot (oops). You started construction on a great new parking lot (nice) in place of an old one, closing it for months in the process (oops).
And you admitted the largest first-year class in school history (nice), while also maintaining one of the largest on-campus sophomore classes ever, and still gave out parking passes like this was Oprah’s Favorite Things — which, by the way, was a great show, but still: big oops.
The writing has been on the wall for years, folks. We’ve been approaching this precarious parking predicament for years. Now it’s here, and it seems the administration has not entirely figured out how to address the problem.
Sadly, it doesn’t look like banishing first-years to park by Drescher is going to be enough to fix these problems — which is too bad, because we hear the Class of 2025 is a big fan of that plan.
The poor planning for on-campus parking only accounts for half of our collective headache. The other part is self-inflicted: students parking like they are 15 years old and just got their driving permits.
Graphic Managing Editor Ashley Mowreader has documented bad parking jobs on her Instagram story for over three weeks, but one woman can only do so much.
Cars are parked across lines in Rho, in fire lanes on Seaver Drive and 5 feet from the curb near the CCB — these visions haunt our dreams.
If nobody has told you yet, let us be the first: If you cannot parallel park, then do not parallel park. Five minutes before your class is not the time to try your luck.
The shame bad parkers should feel for their crimes has not stopped their reign of terror, so to the kind readers who do not possess or have not figured out how to use a backup camera, here is an exhaustive guide to parallel parking.
Pull up next to the car in front of your spot, throw it in reverse, maneuver your back end into the open space and then pull up close to the car ahead of you.
It really is that simple.
This unspeakably horrid situation we all find ourselves in can be helped, though. We can know our limits and not attempt impossible parking jobs, and we can readjust if we mess up.
We can, dare we say, walk from Seaside to Mullin Town Square instead of driving, to alleviate some congestion. Pepperdine could also be more transparent about its limited parking and do a better job encouraging people to leave their cars at home in the future.
Above all else, we can lean on those great words on which Pepperdine as an institution was built.
“Freely ye received parking passes, freely park well.”
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Follow the Graphic on Twitter: @PeppGraphic
Email Pepperdine Graphic Media: peppgraphicmedia@gmail.com
