One of the biggest complaints undergraduates have about UCLA is
the lack of parking. While not having a car can sometimes be a
little annoying, the limited parking situation for undergraduates
is actually very beneficial to both students and the campus as a
whole.
Most importantly, the lack of parking is a major reason why UCLA
hasn’t turned completely into a commuter school, along the
lines of UC Riverside and Cal Poly Pomona. If everyone had cars,
UCLA would clear out on the weekends and become a ghost town.
Westwood would become emptier than a movie theatre showing
“Gigli.” Our nightlife and social scene would just not
be the same.
Being a vibrant and tight-knit community is part of what makes
our school unique. It’s something everyone notices when they
come here on tours or business trips. Wherever you go around
campus, you will find students doing what college students should
be doing: studying in the libraries, going to student group
meetings, hanging out around Bruin Walk, going to UCLA sporting
events, seeing movies together and socializing at bars and
restaurants.
You don’t see the same kind of vibrant student community
at commuter schools because students are never around, except for
when they have classes a few times a week.
Creating enough parking for undergraduates would effectively
open the floodgates. Not only would more students leave on
weekends, but many students whose parents live in the L.A. area
would be more inclined to live at home and commute to school. Other
students would rent apartments far off campus in places like Santa
Monica. Even students who live in Westwood would start to drive
their cars to class.
The main reason why people rent apartments away from campus is
because they are usually cheaper than Westwood apartments. However,
the couple hundred dollars saved on rent is more than cancelled out
by quarterly parking fees, gas money and wasted time spent in
traffic.
The already traffic-plagued streets around UCLA would become
even more jammed by cars. The two-lane streets that go around the
Village simply aren’t designed to handle tens of thousands of
students driving to and from classes every day.
Considering the current state’s fiscal crisis and the
massive UC budget cuts that have come with it, creating more
undergraduate parking should not be on anyone’s priority
list. Additionally, because UCLA is confined, without any room to
expand, new construction projects require demolishing existing
structures.
The most recent example of this is the parking lot under the
Intramural field. Undergraduates lost the use of one of the largest
and most important athletic fields on campus for over two years to
build this parking lot. This kind of tradeoff is unacceptable.
The fact is undergraduates don’t need cars to have a
complete college experience. In fact, if everyone had cars, it
would really subtract from undergraduates’ college
experiences.
Everything students need is within walking distance in Westwood.
Many students use bicycles, skateboards and scooters to make these
distances even shorter. Students who need to get all the way across
campus use Campus Express buses that run every 10 minutes.
Students really only need automobiles to get to a few locations
like the airport, Third Street Promenade and sporting events.
However, buses that run from early in the morning to late at night
go to all these locations. They do not justify building tens of
thousands of more parking spaces.
The main group the limited parking situation at UCLA affects is
the minority of students who live far away from campus and complain
they can barely get parking. First of all, UCLA already provides
7,000 parking spots, available solely to undergraduates, which more
than suffices for these students’ needs. Additionally, the
dormitories currently under construction will soon increase the
amount of on-campus living space for undergraduates, leading to
fewer students living off campus. A more constructive way for these
students to approach the issue would be to change their living
situations to be closer to campus instead of trying to change
UCLA’s parking situation.
Especially in a city plagued by traffic problems like Los
Angeles, it would serve the younger generation well to get used to
using alternative means of transportation.
In the end, creating more parking spaces won’t help
undergraduates at all. It would only serve to drive students even
farther away from campus ““ and from each other.
Bitondo is a third-year political science and history
student. E-mail him at mbitondo@media.ucla.edu. Send general
comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.