Vehicles are parked on campus in January. Photo: Grant Beebe, The Daily Mississippian.
Dark brown, grey exhaust floats up into the soft glow of the morning sun. Eyes are narrowed. Hands tensed up on the edges of steering wheels. Watches are glanced at and fingers tap. Cars idle in never ending lines. The students, faculty, staff within their automobiles, waiting for the reassurance of bright LED backup lights. An empty parking spot is hard to come by on the University of Mississippi campus, but Ole Miss drivers return for five days out of their long weeks to battle for a narrow strip of cement on which they may rest their cars for a few hours.
Every year, the University of Mississippi Department of Parking and Transportation creates a new policy for students, faculty and staff to comply with. They rezone parking, create various parking categories, implement hierarchical structures within these parking categories, and increase parking ticket and parking tag prices. And so every year, those who drive to Ole Miss’s campus must relearn where to park their cars and the rules with which they must comply or else pay a significant fine.
The most recent change affects faculty and staff most. Now they can purchase reserved parking spots for 600 dollars per year, creating the aforementioned hierarchical structure. Besides this, all drivers must deal with the increased prices for each hangtag, visitors must register and pay for parking, gameday parking is completely banned for commuters, faculty and staff, O.U.T. bus hours were expanded and commuter, faculty and staff parking lots shrank.
Many don’t see the reason to pay for parking. They would rather walk, ride their bikes or take the bus than deal with the parking bureaucracy. To them, parking on campus is a fruitless endeavor, filled with disappointment and frustration. Elizabeth Tran, a graduate student in the Master of Fine Arts program, avoids it at all costs.
“I’d rather take my chances with the sweltering heat of the Mississippi sun than deal with this disastrous parking,” Tran said. “It’s so stupid how it works here.”
Every morning Tran, a short, black-haired woman in her early twenties, loads up her bag with the necessities: books, her laptop, a snack, the papers she’s graded for the class she teaches. Then she ascends her driveway, a steep hike filled with cracks and deep potholes. The walk to campus is about two miles, but to her that two miles is worth it because it saves her cash and frustration.
“I never bought a parking decal, and I never will,” Tran said. “The few times I drove to class – illegally, I guess – I ended up being late and left with a parking ticket. It’s like they don’t even want me to be on campus.”
But Tran refuses to miss class, even though it sometimes requires her to walk home alone, late at night. With buses stopping at 9 p.m., she doesn’t have many other choices. And so she braves it, strolling in the darkness of College Hill Road, unprotected by a sidewalk.
Nathaniel Weathersby also lives on College Hill but prefers not to brave that dangerous road on foot. He’s elected to use the Park & Ride lots. These lots sit on the far edges of campus, places that hosts parking spots for which no one is willing to compete because the walk is long and riddled with hills. Each has numerous stalls, sitting stale and unused. Every five minutes between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. a bus swings by to pick up the Park & Ride few. But Weathersby, an Integrated Marketing Communications senior, sees it as a worthwhile alternative to the lots in and around the heart of campus.
“Being able to ride down the road and park and not worry about parking, where it’s not a primary problem or a legitimate concern when I leave early in the morning, and with the bus schedules being really convenient – it’s incredibly easier.”
Weathersby used to carry a commuter tag on his car. But after he found himself giving up on finding a parking spot and skipping class, he gave up commuting. He talks about it like a bad relationship, one filled with betrayal.
“It doesn’t work. Sometimes I think about going back, but I’m incredibly happy with my Park & Ride because commuter is incredibly stressful.” He pauses here and stares down at the ground, nodding. Almost as if he is assuring himself that he isn’t as stressed out as he used to be and focusing on the hardships of commuters. “Now that I don’t use commuter, I’m never late. Those commuter lots are just so much work, so much more laboring. I’m driving around, I’m getting a little angry, and my foot is on the gas pedal. I might as well go home.”
The crammed parking lots are a headache for many. Finding a spot sometimes becomes cutthroat. Students battle students, professors battle professors and sometimes students battle professors for that 7.5 foot by 9 foot block of cement. Jimmy Cajoleas, an adjunct instructor, had to fight his student for a parking spot and lost.
“It took me 25 minutes to park. I was almost late to the class I was going to teach. I actually got cut off by a student trying to get a parking spot for the class I was about to teach,” Cajoleas said. He leaned forward as he said this, pointing downward and to the side, his voice growing tense. “It was one of my students. One of my students cut me off.”
As a commuter, Cajoleas has learned the best way to find a spot on campus. It’s not about where – it’s about when.
“I try to either get there at the ass crack of dawn or way late. I just sit on campus all day and stew.” He laughs. “I bring a sack lunch because it’s not worth moving my car.”
Parking is a difficult situation. The number of students at the university continues to increase; the amount of land the university owns remains the same. More convenient lots can’t be created, and so there seems to be no real solution. Nevertheless, the issue continues to affect all those who travel on the university campus and has led many to give up parking on campus altogether.
— Phil McCausland
dmmanaging@gmail.com
