As Jumbos return to the greater Boston area today from their various spring break locales, they'll be greeted with the familiar quirks of Beantown: funny accents, kick-ass sports teams, an intolerable climate and traffic congestion unlike most other places on earth. Of course, here on the Hill, traffic problems usually manifest themselves in the form of parking woes that have become the bane of many an undergrad driver's existence.
While the Daily fully acknowledges that solving the parking crisis in the Medford-Somerville area would be something of a "Mission: Impossible"-level challenge, there are certainly steps that could be taken to alleviate some of the tensions arising from what is currently an unfair and unequal parking system on campus.
For starters, the gap between the parking privileges afforded to upperclassmen and those granted to sophomores is excessive and, ultimately, impractical. When it comes to dividing up a very limited resource in the most logical and equitable way possible, sophomore drivers clearly get the short end of the stick, being relegated to the Cousens Gym and Hill Hall lots.
Not only do their junior and senior counterparts get access to the lots surrounding Wren and Carmichael Halls in addition to the Cousens and Hill lots, but they do so for the same price. According to the Tufts Public Safety Web site, both the Resident Student Parking Pass for juniors and seniors and the Sophomore Student Parking Pass cost $480.
One might be able to rationalize this inequity by arguing that underclassmen often pay the same amount as juniors and seniors in situations where the latter group enjoys bonus privileges, such as the pecking order that governs course selections.
However, there is no particularly compelling argument to support upperclassmen's parking advantage over sophomores other than that, well, they're upperclassmen. When it comes to course selection, class favoritism allows undergrads fair and equal access over the course of a four-year education to a resource that is equally required by all students: classes. The same cannot be said of the parking system, wherein scarce parking spaces are not necessarily as essential to upperclassmen as they are to sophomores.
When you stop and think about it, how many seniors do you know living in Wren or Carmichael? Let's face it, most upperclassmen at Tufts flee the Hill after their second year in order to avoid the housing crunch, and those that remain generally take up residence in the likes of Sophia Gordon Hall, Stratton Hall or the Latin Way apartments. How many of them, then, really utilize the uphill parking set aside for them?
The simplest solution to this obvious imbalance would be to merge the current Resident and Sophomore Parking Passes into a single Student Parking Pass, giving all sophomores, juniors and seniors equal and uninhibited access on a first-come, first-served basis to the parking locations that are currently available only to juniors and seniors.
Class favoritism might have its place in determining which students gain access to certain limited resources at Tufts, but parking is not one of them.
