Ooo, I did one of these for my city's downtown! It's horribly depressing living here!
this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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Where's the downtown? It's just some scattered buildings surrounded by parking moats! My city's only marginally better. There's about an 8 block area that's actually like a downtown with the rest being parking and buildings that have survived being bulldozed into parking (so far, anyway).
I actually have a poster from the local museum of a map of the city, dated 1881. It had a dense, walkable downtown.
Now it's all parking. Seas of empty asphalt. Like we have a whole ass river and only one waterfront patio because we gave that real estate to parking.
That's so ridiculously bad.
You want to know something even worse?
I still hear people regularly moan the "lack" of parking downtown.
At the uni I went to, parking was limited and you had to apply for a permit to park a car there. Most of us students who lived off campus would commute in by bus.
Parking is limited here, too. Parking passes sell out quickly. No applications needed, though. Instead, you get a chance to buy earlier the more credits you have.
Maybe get unvolved in Student council or however they are called in you Uni and try to find some like minded people to change that or do some guerilla gardening, tactical urbanism etc. to get people to notice how stupid that is, i mean younger peope are usually way more open to less car dependency than the general population
I actually just graduated. I led a student advocacy group fighting for bike lanes and related things like getting rid of parking lots near the center of campus. I met with the student government dozens of times in my last year and had to explain to people almost every time how much of a waste of space parking is.
what is guerilla gardening?
Its when you plant something somewhere without having the right todo so for example in order to protest. So here they could put some plants on parts of the parking lots to fence an area off where he puts for example some benches, where people can study or something instead of cars parking there
Do people from your university actually come by car? That is such an expensive way to travel and in my experience very few student can afford that
In the US, most students drive if they live off campus. Even many of the ones who live on campus keep cars around.
How do you even pay for that? I struggle to have enough money for everything I need. If I had to pay for a car I would be deep in the red.
Yeap. Now you know one of the reasons it's expensive to be poor in America. A car is practically a requirement in most places.
In the town I grew up in, everyone had a car by age 16. There is a bus that comes through town once an hour in either direction during rush hour, so public transit is basically non-existent. By car, this town is 45 minutes from Washington, DC. You would either get a car from your family because they have enough money, or you would start working at age 14 to save up money to buy one yourself. You learn to incorporate the costs of car ownership into your life at an early age and just work enough, or take out enough student loans to pay for it. Cost-of-living calculations done by universities to determine how much you can borrow every year include transportation costs which are often calculated assuming car ownership.
It's unfortunately heavily car-centric. Many students drive.
At my school, some years commuters make up over 50% of the student body....
The sad part is that this is way better than most U.S. cities, let alone strip malls in the middle of nowhere.
Same at mine, actually thought this was mine for a second lol
Is this in the southern part of the US?
University of Maryland it looks like just from that one trail name
It's in Maryland
Go Terps! I also graduated from UMD in 2014!
I can’t believe the size of that campus. Let alone the size of the car parks. The whole campus of the university I attended was 135 acres and yet yours has over half that amount of land dedicated to car parks.
Is this all flat parking lots, or does it include multistory car parks?
I mean, what a waste of space either way!
There are 4 parking garages. Unfortunately two of them are in the middle of campus. I'd rather have more land be used for surface parking because it's much easier to convert that land to some other use. The university thankfully just got rid of one parking lot in the middle of campus that they're replacing with lecture halls and lab space.
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