PARKING

One of the many reasons to love Princeton University is the parking policies. My only other experience with university parking is at BYU. Let me create a hypothetical situation that perfectly describes BYU and their parking. A young man drives onto campus in a hurry to pick up his wife who has just gone into labor. He stops at the gate and relates the story to the parking guard who protects the most sacred of roads in Utah, Campus Drive, which loops the inner campus. You cannot drive on this road unless you have a faculty parking pass or are driving a university vehicle. To keep this road free of the riffraff, there are two parking guard stations with gates at either end of campus. As the man hurriedly asks the guard to lift the gate so that he can pick up his wife and rush her to the hospital, the guard stoically tells the man that without a pass he cannot let him past. But if he would like he can park in a student parking stall approximately 2 miles away behind the Marriott Center in the next county over. The man pleads with the guard, but he refuses to relent, so the man quickly pulls into the nearest spot, a 15 minute temporary spot, and rushes to get his wife. They come back to the car 16 minutes later to find that the car has been ticketed by one of what seems to be thousands of turncoat students who are employed by the parking office to constantly patrol the lots surrounding campus. The husband accepts the ticket knowing that appealing the ticket is as fruitless as trying to get past the guard at the gate.

Compare this to my recent experience parking at Princeton. I had just dropped a friend off at the train station and it was 3pm. The lot next to my building is open to students at the incredibly early hour of 5pm. I didn't want to have to drive home and park at the dorms and walk 20 minutes across campus to work for an hour to turn around and walk another 20 minutes, so I parked in the lot 2 hours early with the expectation that I would likely get a ticket. When I got to my office I related the situation to several students who responded that I would not get a ticket because Princeton issues a warning the first time you violate campus parking policies. This was great news to me. Furthermore, I was informed that if you simply call the parking office, they will frequently let you park in the faculty spots if you have a semi-decent reason. And they're pretty liberal with their reasons; "I didn't want to have to walk back across campus" worked for one of my friends. Anyway, I parked, I worked, I returned to my car to find it free and clear. Having a place to park is such a small thing, but at the same time it feels oh so great to pull up right next to the building on a freezing cold afternoon in mid February.