LETTER: Parking, traffic policies source of confusion, inconvenience, tension
To the editor:
We are glad that Neill Binford is concerned about our safety ("Bikers, skaters speeding on campus will be fined," Thresher , April 12). We are a little distressed, however, by the general enforcement of traffic policies by the Campus Police.
Our primary area of concern lies in the adversarial relationship between student drivers and traffic enforcement. Recently Binford announced that he would be forming special patrols to ticket speeding bikers and skaters.
Before this problem is addressed, we should address older, more persistent problems. One such problem is the use of booting.
To us, ticketing is a better response to the traffic problems of the Rice community. We are disappointed that booting of cars has become commonplace on this campus. While we recognize that this is easier than towing, it has several disadvantages.
The most significant disadvantage is that while punishing one member of the Rice community for parking illegally it simultaneously punishes others by depriving them of parking spots until the boot is removed. It seems that in a community such as ours, booting vehicles is excessively punitive for an act that is not malicious in nature.
At times, the current policy seems to encourage ticketing when it is easy rather than when it is merited. Although we do recognize that ticketing is sometimes necessary, it seems that a warning, more often than not, would suffice.
We applaud the recent decision to open some staff lots at 3:30 p.m., but we suspect that this time could be moved as early as the end of the lunch hour.
We feel that other improvements could be made to the traffic enforcement policy.
Fines for failure to register should be dropped when the car is registered. The fine is imposed to prevent abuses of Rice parking facilities by Medical Center personnel, but, yet again, it most often serves to punish Rice students unnecessarily.
As members of Sid Richardson College, we are sympathetic to the plight of those individuals who have received tickets for very short-term violations of the parking policy (even with their flashers on). We feel that short-term parking with flashers should be allowed in all lots, not just on the inner loop.
There is simply no other alternative for those individuals who do not have parking privileges in the college lots.
The lot already has two 45 minute spots, but these are often full, while there is clearly space available in the reserved lot for the short-term needs that residents have.
We would also like to see more clearly marked parking areas. For example, the SRC lot was not delineated from the Herring Hall lot for more than one semester. We would even go so far as to suggest that some kind of color-coding scheme for the parking lots should be instituted. Since the stickers are already color coded, why not the lots?
Finally we request that Binford examine the possibility that the lots should not be ticketed until they are nearly full. Some form of guideline (80 percent capacity) should be established so that students who park in half-empty lots can feel sure that they will not be ticketed unnecessarily.
We concede that if the lot should fill up, the student should not have any recourse for appeal on grounds that the lot was not full when he arrived.
In closing, we would like to reiterate that we are all in the same community. We are disappointed that animosity between students, administrators and Campus Police persists over an issue as mundane as traffic enforcement policy.
We hope that Binford will seek to eliminate this element of adversity as he re-examines the policies governing traffic enforcement at Rice.
Josh Earnest
SRC '97
Paul O'Brien
SRC '97
This item appeared in the Opinion section of the April 19, 1996 issue.
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