By KAROLINA JURESIUTE
Senior Reporter
To find a parking spot at any university can be and is challenging for students, professors and faculty.
At Northwestern a lot of students are complaining about the number of open parking spots.
“Finding a parking spot close to the building is much harder this year than it was last year,” sophomore Janie Rempel, education major from Forgan, Oklahoma said. “You get lucky if you can find one close by and don’t have to walk that far.”
Some parking spaces are not wide enough or not big enough for the bigger trucks, so then that results in taking up two parking spaces and reducing the availability for the others, students said.
People parking in the wrong places also limits availability for others.
“It is alright for the most part,” a health and sports science major Jackson Albert from Hutchinson, Kansas, said. “there are times where both Coronado Hall lots are full.”
Students that commute and don’t live on campus seem to have more problems than the students that live in the dorms as the parking lots next to their class buildings are full.
“We do have some parking lots that are never full that they can park in,” Northwestern’s chief of police, Dennis Kilmer, said. “We have one that’s across the street here from the donut shop, we got that big one there and there’s one right across the street from it but it is not paved. We also have one on the West side of campus across the Eight street, and very few people ever use it”
Kilmer said, he parks on the Eight street himself, walks across the campus from there to work every day and doesn’t mind it.
With Herod Hall construction project being in progress, some of the parking spots are blocked off for the workers and their trucks and trailers for whenever they need to come in, which makes it tough for other people to park, Kilmer said.
One of the other problems is that Northwestern has a lot of students who live on campus and like to drive to get as close to class as they are able to.
“No one has ever really in any of the beginning of school meetings mentioned the fact that those who live on campus is expected to park in their assigned parking lots and walk to class, so a lot of them drive, because I see a lot of stickers from different dorms all over campus.” Kilmer said.
Parking in a wrong lot can result in a $15 ticket and parking in a handicapped spot can result in a $50 ticket. This year Kilmer said he has written about 40-50 tickets so far and most of them were warnings.
Parking in the parking lot in front of the wellness center is off limits to everybody, except the people who buy the memberships for the wellness center.
Students and staff can still park behind the wellness center, that parking lot doesn’t have any restrictions.
Students can make it better by parking as good as possible, attempting not too take up more than one spot and parking fully in that spot. It would also help if students who live on campus walked to class instead of drove.
