By Ben Wires

Having spent a number of years at the University, it’s become a yearly ritual of mine to open the pages of The CW and see at least one article on parking early in the semester. Just as surely as the article will appear, someone will cry out “I should be allowed to drive to class! Why, I paid $225 of my dollars for this permit!”

In this situation, the common response is to mention privilege, entitlement or some other insult aimed at the new freshmen who are, inevitably, the folks being asked for their opinions on parking, all while, the more experienced upper classmen roll their collective eyes. If you want my opinion, The CW should instead publish why the parking system works the way it does.

To that end, I took the liberty of calculating some figures that might help explain to the new students why they can’t drive all over campus and park wherever they want. First, the permit for commuter spaces costs $225 per year. This works out to around $1.50 a day, assuming students don’t skip. That’s not too bad, right? I’d wager that students living in some of the more remote apartments pay more than $1.50 in gas per day traveling, not to mention the gas you’d burn sitting in traffic trying to park.

Second, the traffic on campus is already horrible. Picture this: if half of the 12,698 student parking spots are occupied at any given time, and half of those are trying to drive to class between classes, this works out to 8.5 miles of bumper-to-bumper traffic if the average car length is that of a Kia Rio (a pretty conservative estimate). To put that into perspective, those cars would completely back up the entirety of Paul W. Bryant Drive, University Boulevard from McFarland Boulevard to Publix, and all of the other roads on campus simultaneously, if parked bumper to bumper.

Want to see for yourself how terrible traffic can get? Try to leave for Thanksgiving break by going down McFarland Boulevard to Interstate 20/59, and then keep in mind that a lot of people go via 69 South. Then, imagine that traffic on a two-lane road instead of the six lanes on McFarland Boulevard. Hope this helps to clear some stuff up.

Ben Wires is a senior majoring in chemical engineering.