Parking problems panic students
Posted on January 24, 2008
Due to the construction of a third east campus dorm, the Chesapeake-Potomac parking lot has been moved to Blue Ridge Hall and the Arboretum, causing some to worry more about parking.
“We all know what an issue parking is,” JMU President Linwood Rose said at Tuesday night’s Student Government Association meeting. “It always has been. It always will be. I don’t know any universities that don’t have parking problems. Usually the problem is not having enough space, the problem is where is the space.”
Some students think walking from a farther lot creates safety issues.
“It’s dangerous to be walking out late at night,” sophomore Casey Shaw said, adding that she is usually the designated driver and feels unsafe walking back at night.
Shaw’s parents wrote a letter to parking services, who said that the campus cadets are available to escort anyone who feels unsafe walking back.
“But no one is going to take advantage of that,” Shaw said. She thinks the university should allow students to park in Festival without getting a ticket.
Others accept the change.
“I have to walk farther away to get to my car, but there’s really nothing else they can do because they’re building a new dorm,” sophomore Alissa Davidson said.
Rose said that given the inevitability of construction not everyone can be pleased.
“People were concerned about being inconvenienced because we had a project and had to walk around it or something like that,” he said. “Yet if you look back on it, we’ve added many facilities that students who came later who weren’t inconvenienced got to enjoy and appreciate.”
Since 1998, total parking spaces have increased 95 percent from 4,827 to 9,509, whereas people per parking space have decreased from 3.3 to 2, according to Rose. In order to increase the number of parking lots as well as academic buildings, the university has acquired dozens of properties including the Arboretum lots, Blue Ridge Hall, the C-1 parking lot, land on Port Republic Road and the Rockingham Memorial Hospital.
