Am I the only one who thinks this is wrong? An alternative headline could be something like, "Entitled College Kids Learn How To Keep Parking Like Assholes Without Paying Fines."
And it's a pyrhic victory anyway, because chances are now the cars will get one of the metal tire boots put on, or get towed. Both of which are more expensive and a bigger hassle for everybody.
The issue I have is cases like at my school where they basically had entrapment. At the start of every year there'd be like 2-3 months where it's a free for all and students could park wherever. The certainty was nowhere near adequate parking and not everywhere that people parked was readily obvious to be illegal. Some spots had the yellow on the curb worn away 90%, others were things like too close to a corner or hydrant by everyone was doing it those 2-3 months that you get used to it and think it's okay and when there's no other spots left you park in one of those spaces (kind of like when people start creating a new parking lane in the center of a full parking lot).
After a few months of no enforcement and letting the students get used to parking like this, then they'll crack down with brutal enforcement. I'm talking about them sniping you a few minutes after you walk away. Every year they'd reset and do the same thing over again to get some fresh meat.
Not entrapment, just a case of administration trying to save costs by not dealing with the issue until it becomes too much and then cutting costs once it’s in control again.
The argument that it’s immoral to deal with people breaking the law because their used to getting away with it is absurd.
The sense of entitlement is absurd. If you park illegally you’ll get a fine, deal with it.
Entrapment is the state coercing someone to do something they would not do under normal circumstances. It sounds to me as if these people are illegally parking under normal circumstances. The rules about curbs, hydrants, driveways, &c are well known and common enough between every state that there is no excuse that they weren't aware this was illegal.
Which is exactly why you're able to speed with impunity, even if you receive a ticket for it?
Most places do not make the rules unclear and many rules brought up in the subthread, e.g. hydrants and parking near an intersection, are well known and common among the states.
Look, I'm not saying that basically giving everyone a month with no warnings and then going out in force isn't a crappy thing to do. I'm just saying that that's not entrapment, nor is an an awful thing for the police to do, even if there are nicer ways to do it, e.g. giving notices on windshields for the first week of the semester and afterwards being issuing tickets.
Highly unethical to expect people to follow the law? We're not talking acts of civil disobedience against unjust laws, we're talking willful abuse of laws designed for public safety.
City streets are not the campus facilities, and what of the people using public transit or other means of transportation? Should they have to pay additional on their tens of thousands to subsidize those people with cars?
It is transparently using the enforcement in a predatory way. Their goal clearly isn't to keep the parking enforced or they would have done it from the start or at least after move in times. That is what is highly unethical - they deliberately let the /problem start/ for profit.
They aren't the law either any more than Jimmy's Pizza place is when the call to tow a car that was abandoned for a week.
I don't know the situation, but I could easily imagine parking violations being common where parking is inadequate. Instead of improving the situation, the school simply rakes in money.
This really depends on the state. In Montana, for example, it is a legal requirement that parking is funded separate from the rest of the school. This means that no tuition can pay for new lots or enforcement. Fees gathered from normal parking rates and fines are used only to maintain and/or improve the parking.
This seems like a really convenient way for schools to pass the buck on to their students, while administrative bureaucrats continue to rake salaries in the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.
How is is not? Many colleges now have more administration staff than education faculty... I know that at my university they constructed a massive new building to house their growing administrative staff.
Not quite 50/50 but the University of Oregon lists 2075 faculty and 1521 administrators and officers of administration. Also, 112 of those faculty are listed as retired.
Why should students get free parking? It is a choice to use the parking facilities (those with mobility issues aside). I am in favor of parking rates being based on commute distance. If you live within a reasonable walking distance, say two miles, then you can't get a parking pass. Then concentric rings out from there with decreasing cost. While there would be some address fraud, it would help to reduce the dependence on parking.
I went to a university that has no shortage of land to expand to. This meant that they have a couple of very large parking lots for on-campus students and some large commuter parking lots. If you didn't mind walking, parking was easy to come by. Those that complained about a 10 minute walk thought there was no parking. Funny thing was that it was easy to cross all of campus in less that 15 minutes. Really is a matter of perspective, I suppose.
Why are college kids driving in the first place? Are there not enough apartments nearby to rent a room in walking/cycling/shuttle range? Isn't that a pretty foreseeable need when choosing a site for a university?
I can understand this problem if you're serving a lot of nontraditional students who already have households, but not with 18-22 year old full time students.
There are both "residential" and "commuter" colleges. For instance in my locale, the Big Ten university is mostly residential for undergrads (served by large student rental neighborhoods), and the housing typically chosen by grad students has decent access to the bus service, or bike-friendly routes.
There's also a community college that serves a lot of commuting students, and has none of its own housing.
The regional colleges have more commuter students, since you can save a boatload of money by living at home, but also probably don't have such severe parking problems -- land is cheaper.
This really depends on the college town. In East-Coast urban cores, most students won't be able to afford to park at any time. Everywhere else in USA, they have free parking where they stay, and also they're culturally conditioned to consider walking or biking to be beneath their station, so they'll consider free parking near their classes to be their birthright.
Which university? I've never been on a major college campus where it was even possible to park near the classroom buildings, much less practical. I live a few blocks from a Big Ten university in the Midwest. When classes are in session, the extensive rows of bike racks are stuffed full of bikes, to the point where illegal bike parking is actually a problem.
What I described is certainly the situation at e.g. Illinois, Indiana, and Nebraska, to name three "Big Ten" schools. I suppose I haven't done a complete survey, however. There are lots of other, smaller colleges where this is also true.
In my home town the local community college was a 45 minute drive from my parents house. I couldn't afford to move in to the city just to go to school. People who move to attend college are the exception not the rule, by the numbers.
Yeah, but further down in the article it mentioned that students illegally parked junkyard cards to get booted so that all the boots would be in use when the cops found someone's actual vehicle they wouldn't have any boots left.
> Both of which are more expensive and a bigger hassle for everybody.
That's the point. The university was crowing about how they deployed 40000 of these things already. They wouldn't be able to tow 40000 people as easily.
You hit the nail on the head. It's not about enforcement it's ease of collecting money.
Me and my wife had to fight a ticket at one point for a spot we had paid for. No ryme or reason the lot was just grabbing revenue by literally stealing from customers with small tickets that they thought would not be challenged because
- you can have your license revoked for non payment of tickets
- you aren't entitled to a court hearing for a parking ticket so fighting it means figuring out how to handle it yourself or hiring an attorney to fight $30 tickets.
The best model for interactions in capitalism is predator prey wherein virtually no one is actually thinking of the system as a whole and sane conditions are only apparent as an emergent property of adversarial interactions.
Entitled College Kids Learn How To Keep Parking Like Assholes Without Paying Fines."
In the UK parking at NHS hospitals is a lucrative revenue stream for parking companies - they toss the NHS a few pennies to justify it but it’s exploitation of those in an emotional state, such as visiting a very sick relative, or even picking up someone to take home. Any techniques developed to defeat those parasites is a public good.
I hate people who don't park in a proper spot or who just leave the car in a garage in a spot next to the door all summer while they leave town/country like used to happen at my old university but I see this more as "college spends money on some high tech device that is easily circumvented and has poor security" than as college students screwing over the system.
And it's a pyrhic victory anyway, because chances are now the cars will get one of the metal tire boots put on, or get towed. Both of which are more expensive and a bigger hassle for everybody.