Robert Gordon
Writing 101
Krueger
Summer 2013

Attempting to find student parking at Ole Miss is by far one of the most horrific tasks. There appears to be little that is being done to help alleviate the problems that arise from parking on campus. The large number of students and faculty and the limited number of spaces causes congestion and headache to all involved. The University’s parking services needs to do more to help with the problems at hand. To begin with, The University’s parking services sells more than double the amount of parking decals than there are parking places. Making money for the school is all well and good, but people are on campus at different times for different reasons and spots are needed. As the amount of students attending Ole Miss continues to grow, parking will continue to decrease. Students have to arrive on campus at least an hour before class to hopefully find parking. This causes many students to skip class rather than deal with the stress of finding a place to park their car. Bad weather and the limited parking is also an issue. The school is constantly renovating and creating new buildings to help with the influx of people and revamp the beauty of the campus. In recent years, ole buildings were knocked down to build new dorms because each year the incoming freshman class gets larger and larger. In doing so, the school had to knock out some of the parking that was used for freshman with a car. This took spots away that were necessary and also helpful. The construction also caused the school to change student and faculty parking around which is taking away needed spots for commuters. Many times the faculty parking lots are empty or have many open spaces that could be used by commuters if they were allowed. Second, there are designated parking sections for everyone whether it is commuter, faculty, fraternity, or even a freshman living on campus. But due to the limited amount of parking places and the large number of parking decals sold, students have a hard time finding a place to park on campus causing them to frequently end up with tickets. Parking tickets on the Ole Miss campus is hard to avoid a lot of the time because when a student needs to park to get to class or a meeting they will do what they have to and hope for the best. The school makes lots of money off of student parking tickets every semester because there is always someone that is parked in their non designated area. In 2012 Ole Miss made over $871,000 in parking tickets alone (mlovell91, 2011, October 8, wordpress, http://mlovell91.wordpress.com/2011/10/18/ole-miss-students-speak-out-on-problems-with-parking-on-campus/). There are always parking services staff walking around campus looking for people parked in the wrong place or parked too long somewhere else. Much of the time students have no other choice but to park where they can find a place and hope for the best.
Lastly, Ole Miss has not come up with very many options to help with the congestion on campus due to all the cars and the headaches of hoping to find a place to park on campus. One of the few and newest options that the school has offered is the park and ride option in the south lot and at the old Walmart. This option will create more than 1,000 new spots for students (Lindsey Abernathy, @012, July 23, http://news.olemiss.edu/fall-semester-parking-changes-first-of-many/#.UfAUKtKsiSo). Parking services hopes that this will alleviate much of the traffic that is on campus and also create more opportunities for students to find places to park. This option can be somewhat of a hassle but the parking services staff are hoping that more students will take advantage of this opportunity. Many students have purchased the park and