Permitting failure

It's no secret: IU has a perennial parking problem. There have been many ideas over the years to solve this problem. The latest suggestion by the President's Parking Commission is to raise the price of A permits and prohibit graduate students from buying A and C permits. The theory goes that if A permits are more expensive, there will be less demand for them; additionally, if graduate students cannot buy A and C permits, there will be more available to faculty members. Presumably those graduate students who must drive will have to buy E permits, park at the stadium and ride the bus.\nThis is a shortsighted and poorly conceived solution. The housing market in Bloomington makes it such that many faculty, staff and students live far from campus and simply must drive to school. Those same people will still have to drive to campus if parking permits are further restricted, but they might have to choose between a headache of a commute and coughing up more cash.\nAnd how is it, exactly, that more commuters are to be channeled to the stadium to park, right on the heels of a cut-back in bussing to and from the stadium that began in October? Many graduate students work very early and very late hours. Suppose a biology graduate student leaves the lab at midnight. Is he supposed to walk to the stadium in the dark? If on-campus parking is to be further restricted, the availability of public transportation must be expanded, because, let's face it, the IU campus is enormous.\nGraduate students are required to bear much of the teaching load. They are asked to teach classes and grade many assignments in addition to doing their research. To make it extremely inconvenient for them to even get to work is hardly the thanks they deserve for their toil.\nThe President's Parking Commission found a Band-Aid for the problem, but it is not a long-term solution. The fact of the matter is that as long as there are graduate students and faculty living off campus as commuters, they will have to park somewhere.\nWe could pave over the Arboretum and put in a parking lot, or, even better, a 10-story parking garage, but no one really wants that. Why not build parking garages where we already have parking lots? But garages take a long time and a lot of money to build. A cheaper, more immediate solution would be to grant faculty and graduate students D permits or rezone central D lots to C lots. Most undergraduates living on campus will not even roll a tire during the week; wouldn't those parking spaces better serve our hard-working instructors? Other large universities in Indiana, such as Ball State and Purdue, restrict freshman parking to a far greater extent than we do. Giving those parking spots to graduate students would better serve our student body.