End the Parking Struggle and Ride the Shuttle

By Zoe Mariotti, Ben Kutina, Montserrat Franco, EWU Students

Dear Editor,

The location of the free parking lot is just too far away. Many of us have had the struggle of trying to find parking on and around campus. We are sometimes late to class and it can be detrimental to our learning, as well as disruptive. There’s a simple solution to make the parking at Eastern more efficient. Any student or faculty will tell you that parking on campus is not always a pleasant experience. With expensive rates for parking passes, the only two other options for parking is to try and join the rat race of parking on the streets or parking in the free lot and trekking it to class. One way to make the parking experience more enjoyable and time efficient would be to have shuttles run from the free parking lot to campus. This would be an easy, feasible amenity that would greatly help students and faculty. There’s already a shuttle that runs from the free lot to the entrance of the football stadium during games, so why not have one during the school day? Administrators think it’s not a “feasible solution.” This is because they aren’t making any profit off of it, even though it would be a great improvement to our beautiful campus. With the support of our students and faculty, we could easily make room in the budget toward solving our parking predicament on campus. A benefit to having these shuttles would be less traffic and congestion in the streets around campus. This will open our streets, reduce the number of distracted drivers looking for spots and keep the campus safe.

Sincerely,

Concerned Students