Limited space combined with high demand has made parking on and around campus into a difficult everyday challenge for many students. This fall brought in the largest incoming class of first-year students since before COVID-19, meaning more commuter students and more fighting the battle of finding somewhere to park while they attend their classes.
Hamline Public Safety’s (HPS) dispatch lead, Corrina Gumphrey, has recognized this increase and has increased communication regarding parking availability.
“As a department, we have done a few things to accommodate the increased number of students on campus. The first is ensuring that we are transparent and communicate the expectations of parking and parking enforcement . . . The second is increasing the parking enforcement. As a department, we want to make sure that students who pay for a parking pass get a parking spot,” Gumphrey said.
One of the primary factors in finding a parking spot is timing. Early in the morning, when the first classes of the day have yet to begin, parking is usually available. Later in the day, however, some students might find themselves out of luck and consistently unable to put their parking pass to use. And not every student has the luxury of arriving on campus early, even if they wanted to.
“I’ve learned, depending on your schedule, you can’t guarantee a spot,” graduate student Abby Tapajna said.
Tapajna bought a graduate student parking pass after spending two years as an undergraduate without one due to the high cost of the undergraduate parking pass compared to how infrequently they could actually benefit from its perks.
“[If] my classes are starting really late, it’s not worth it because the lot’s full, so I just decided to street park instead,” Tapajna said.
Lack of parking is more than just an inconvenience, too. Commuter students, some of whom already have to spend over an hour in transit to get to campus, risk missing classes, clubs or sports activities if they arrive on campus only to find all of the nearby spots taken up. There’s no guarantee they’ll find a spot on the street nearby, either, and if they’re particularly unlucky, they could end up having to run to their event.
Unfortunately, the only real way to safeguard against this is to leave even earlier, just in case no spots are open, meaning commuter students who already have long transit times might need to drag them out even further.
Some students have opted to take an active approach towards addressing the parking problems on campus. Shawn Ryan, Hamline’s Military Student Representative, is currently working with the Hamline Undergraduate Student Congress (HUSC) to draft a resolution that, if submitted to and endorsed by the administration, could help remedy the problem of limited parking for all students while also providing veteran students with additional benefits.
The idea, he said, is to allow veteran students to obtain parking passes for the Anderson Center ramp, which currently only offers parking passes to faculty and staff. This would give veteran students, who are often non-traditional commuter students, a safer place to park on campus that is also more central to where most classes are. At the same time, this would free up other parking on campus for students who could now backfill the empty spots these passholders would leave behind.
“There’s virtually no downside for Hamline to do [this],” Ryan said. “There’s an issue, and there’s a win-win solution to it. Why are we not starting to implement that?”
Ryan hopes that if the potential parking program goes well for veterans, it could also be expanded to help other commuter students, prioritizing other non-traditional students with lengthy commute times. In the meantime, Hamline’s commuters will have to wait and see whether the idea has legs.
