At Duke, every year nearer to matriculation carries with it distinct lessons about how, where, and when to park.

Freshman year enables students to park practically on their doorsteps in the Red Zone. At least, until the lot is inexplicably full and you need to park on the other side of East Campus or face a hefty parking fine. As a sophomore, the question becomes not whether there is parking to be found but rather how many acres of Blue Zone the student must navigate to make it back to West. And for the upperclassmen and graduate students — well, we get to taste the rainbow. Red, Orange, Green, Blue, Violet: each color marks a different lot with a different parking requirement. Not to mention the HP-3, PGC-65, and other signifiers that sound more like a new brand of jumbo jet than a specific parking pass.

On its face, the parking system seems admirably organized. Each different lot, no matter how miniscule, is reserved for a specific kind of access. Law school students and employees, Trinity faculty, etc. – each group is reserved its own parking area. To appreciate how disorderly this system truly is, however, we should take a step back and question its necessity.

Who you gonna call?

Exhibit A: Trent building. As an underclassman, I chronically avoided classes in this building because it is so inaccessible from both East and West campuses. Now, as an off-campus senior, I somehow ended up with class there four times a week. So where exactly can a person park near Trent building?

Not in the gated Trent lot, even though it is perpetually empty. Not in the GC lot across from Trent building, even though it is also rarely full. Certainly not in the massive H lot, even farther away, nor in the residential lots on Yearby or Anderson streets. Definitely not in the enormous Medical Center garage on Flowers Drive, nor in the never-occupied carpool spots along the street, unless you can prove
that not only that you are driving another undergraduate to class, but that said undergrad also has a Blue Zone pass and is declining to use it in favor of carpooling. In fact, according to a private correspondence with Duke Parking, the Blue Zone is the closest legal lot to Trent building for undergraduates. If you’re a freshman with a car, you might as well walk from East campus.

Transportation Fail

Crucially, the problem is not just one of inefficiency but of, quite literally, stupidity. The point of a car is to increase mobility and ease of transportation from one location to another. But freshmen can only legally park on East Campus. Upperclassmen can only legally park on West Campus. Students are not statues embalmed in cement: they travel from campus to campus. Limiting the legal parking areas to one lot per class defeats the entire purpose of having a car at all.

Duke Parking, the only organization capable of shedding light on this quandary, was regrettably unavailable for comment, although I requested an interview with their VP of Parking no less than four times. So we must rely on conjecture. Freshmen can park on East but not West because Parking fears a massive influx of freshmen with cars parking in the Blue Zone when they go to class for the
day. They fear East Campus lots being swamped by upperclassmen driving to their classes in Friedl, Carr, and White. And, more importantly, they want to reserve specific lots so that faculty, many of whom are elderly, do not have to walk too far from their cars. These are absolutely reasonable fears. But we’re solving them the wrong way.

Parking is self-limiting

The problem with Duke Parking’s “overpopulation” hypothesis is that if students could actually park in more than one lot, any given lot would lose and gain spots at the same time. At 1:00, when the mighty freshmen are prowling the Blue Zone so that they can make their classes on West, upperclassmen would be occupying those freshmen’s spots on East. The lots don’t have to be able to hold twice as many students as they currently support; they simply need to have enough cushion to accommodate the very predictable influx and outflux of vehicles during the middle of the week.
Generally, driving from East to West is only advisable during the C-1’s most busy hours, since the Blue Zone is simply so far away from West Campus. Making driving a more feasible option by removing parking restrictions would ease pressure from the overcrowded buses in the middle of the day.

There is no credible reason to expect that off-campus undergraduates will create
parking congestion either. The only pass these students are allowed to purchase,
at this point in time, is Blue Zone access, because the commuting undergraduates
almost exclusively visit West Campus. They are too small a denomination and
their needs are being met too well right now for them to create congestion in a
total liberation scenario. Far from creating a parking nightmare, freeing up all of the lots (not just the Blue and Red Zones) would release a gargantuan number of spots that are currently unoccupied 24/7/365.25. Rooting students in place creates congestion by not allowing them to park in the most convenient lot based on their specific needs. Since different students have different needs, convenience is self-regulating.

But wait, surely I can’t be advocating total liberation? What about the lots used by graduate students, scientists, and Medical Center personnel? The most obscure lots, simply due to their obscurity, would receive the least influx of traffic under the total liberation scheme. The Law School’s lot would not suddenly become overwhelmed by undergraduates because who wants to park all the way out in the
Law School if their destination is West Campus? The lot would become accessible to students who need to park there for a justifiable, academic, short-term visit however. The most specialized lots would only see an increase in parking from the people who actually need to use those lots who are currently SOL.

The remaining question concerns the aged professor. Under no circumstances should he or she be obligated to park as far away as a nimble undergraduate. But the answer is right in front of our faces. We reserve specific parking spots all the time. Specific spots are reserved for handicap vehicles, maintenance vehicles, and other specific services which require that a minimal number of spots be reserved at all times. Faculty should get as many parking spots as they need to ensure optimal parking. But we don’t need to gate off entire lots to accomplish this. The lower Allen lot doesn’t need to remain empty 90% of the time in order to guarantee that faculty can park where they want to. 50
spaces in the Trent lot don’t need to remain vacant all the time so that a dozen faculty
can park there as needed. We simply need to provide a limited number of named
parking spaces in each lot for faculty members. So why have the colored pass
system, what does ROYGBV do for us?

It’s a trap!

It’s a Ponzi scheme, plain and simple. Parking passes are issued by Duke Parking.
They have no competition, since the university grants them a monopoly on
local parking; they can charge whatever they want for the passes. Parking fines are
administered outside of judicial oversight; they can charge what they want for those
too. Got fined erroneously? You can appeal the charge…to Duke Parking. The same
agency sells the passes, creates the parking restrictions, and collects on the inevitable
violations.

And the “no parking” restrictions are arbitrarily established and arbitrarily
enforced. The brief grace period students are afforded to park in illegal areas in order
to unload heavy baggage and for other legitimate purposes is rarely observed. Our
rent-a-cops are more likely to speed across East Campus to collect on a five minute
($200) fire lane violation than to pursue one of those actual offenders we hear about
in the frequent Larry Moneta security alert emails. But the real problem is not the
zealous employees, it is the institutional setting that allows them unrestricted and
nonjusticiable access to your wallet.

Students have no say in this process. The appeals committee purportedly contains some student participation, but those students are selected secretly at PTS’s discretion, not elected through an open application process. The parking restrictions themselves are simply outside the scope of our control. We are literally victims of a system that can fine us outrageous sums when, if, and most importantly where it chooses. We should not be complacent while this injustice continues: students should wield the
government apparatuses available to us. Take action. There is no room on this campus for tyrannical policy making.

• Top Democrats drop out of 2010 election races
  Dorgan (D-ND), Dodd out (D-CT) (Politico)
  Democratic majority still looks safe (Politico)
  CO Governor Bill Ritter (D) drops out (WSJ), CO Interior Secretary Ken Salazar will not run for Governor (Washington Post)
• NJ State Senate rejects gay marriage proposal in a 20-14 vote.  The bill’s supporters had hoped it would be passed before Governor Corzine left office.  (NY Times)
• Improvements in security policies ordered after attempted terrorist attack Christmas Day (NY Times), summary of security review available here (WSJ)
• Republicans put hold on TSA nominee Erroll Southers, who has previously accessed confidential database files without license.  There were also concerns that Southers would support TSA unionization.  (Washington Post)
• EPA proposes tougher regulations on smog, could cost industries $19-$90 billion. (WSJ)
• Unemployment is at 10 percent, with 85,000 more jobs lost in December.  (Politico)
• Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV) apologized for comments relating to Barack Obama’s race, not planning to step down or resign.  (Politico)

White House Communications Anita Dunn’s (who is stepping down at the end of the month) recent attacks on Fox News for being the “communications arm of the Republican Party” have only helped fuel more conversation about mass media and its liberal/conservative slants.

Well, here is a report that claims Fox News is indeed fair and balanced.  Apparently, Fox is harsh on Obama during the election season last year, but the controversial network treated McCain with almost equal numbers of negative comments.  And now that Obama has been in power for some time and the “presidential honeymoon” is over, other networks have joined Fox with their negative evaluations of the president.  It even seems possible that Fox is more fair and balanced than its competitors because it is harsh towards everyone, not just Republicans.