For students, parking at U of L is a nightmare. There’s a choice of paying $90 and over for a parking pass that may or may not ensure you a spot – at residential halls, lots fill up quickly, forcing tenants to seek parking in the Floyd Street parking garage – or you can find free parking a few blocks away and walk an extra ten minutes to class. Even this latter option has become harder with the death of the ‘janky lot.’

To make matters more difficult, the University is killing more student parking spots with the building of the new student recreation center, near Kurz Hall. This knocked out enough parking that they had to set up an overflow lot by the Province – not exactly ideal for the students who have to walk there. What happens to the students who work late and have to walk back to their dorms after dark? Walking across campus at night is scary and shouldn’t even be a problem that students face.

The University keeps building and building and building a ton of new structures, but it’s compromising parking. When parking is in such short demand already, the only thing U of L should be building is a new parking structure.

Not only does the parking situation inconvenience students, but it infringes upon the lives of residents around the university. If residents of the Province are having a hard time parking in front of their apartments – a convenience that they pay a lot of money for – then this overflow lot is apparently not a good idea. Residents of Old Louisville, too, have to deal with students who take up street parking and walk to school. To pay to live in a house in Old Louisville isn’t cheap enough to have to put up with students who don’t care that they’re inconveniencing the people who live in the area.

U of L keeps growing, but stuck in the middle of the city like it is, it doesn’t have enough room to spread out. Because campus is wedged into a small space, parking is exchanged for the opportunity to grow. This isn’t an acceptable exchange for those who have to deal with it every day.

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