Logan Ramsey
Associate Editor
The thing about ISU’s campus that infuriates me the most as an off-campus student is the parking situation.
In this regard, the structure of campus is severely lacking in where it needs to be, and the result is packed parking lots that don’t properly suit the needs of students who don’t live on campus.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I can’t count the number of times last year where I was late to a class or a meeting because I couldn’t find a good parking spot on campus and had to go to the back of the PSUB parking lot or find street parking off-campus. I now carpool with my roommates, and we consistently can’t find parking at the PSUB parking lot at 9:30 a.m.
It seems to me that the only way to find good parking on-campus is to buy a reserved parking pass, which not many people can afford, or show up to campus before the sun comes up, and that shouldn’t be the case.
This isn’t a problem specific to ISU. Most college campuses have terrible parking, but what frustrates me is that ISU doesn’t have the parking capabilities to accommodate all of its off-campus students.
ISU hasn’t officially come out with its enrollment numbers yet, but the university guesses that its total number of students on the Pocatello campus is about 10,000 students.
Now compare this to the number of parking spots on campus. According to parking services, there are 5,854 parking spots.
That’s a difference of 4,146. Let’s even say that none of the 757 students who live in residence halls have cars, that’s still a difference of 3,389.
That is a massive gap in students to parking spots, and that’s not even counting faculty members, administrators and employees who use the parking spaces. This shows me that general parking passes aren’t even worth buying if you’re not guaranteed a spot.
The issue is that ISU hasn’t put much effort into bettering the parking situation on campus. Out of all the new buildings that have been put on campus, including most recently the Rendezvous building, the school has never built a parking garage.
To me it looks like the gap between students and parking spaces is enough to warrant a small parking garage. If I could wave a magic wand, I would put a parking garage on one half of Cadet
Field and leave the other half. That way there could be plenty of parking spaces right near the center of campus.
Even then, at the very least the university should lessen the amount of reserved parking spaces, because not all the spaces even get used. Meanwhile, while there’s empty parking spaces in the middle of campus, students have to walk to class all the way down from the Holt Arena parking lot.
While just about every college across the country nickels and dimes its students for parking money, the underdeveloped parking at ISU isn’t even worth paying for. Because of this, I’ll continue to street park on 5th Avenue until parking is finally more developed.
