How does the $75 parking permit benefit anything?

The off-street winter parking ban is what us off-campus students dread. From Dec. 1, 2016 until March 31, 2017 from 1 a.m. to 6 a.m., it is prohibited to park vehicles in the streets. This law was established in order to allow plow trucks to completely clear the roads of snow.

If your vehicle is in violation of this law and found in the street on a night that the plows must remove snow, it will be towed. When your vehicle is towed, it costs between $150 to $200 to get it back. On top of this huge ne, you must nd

a ride to a car shop in town in order to pick it.If snow does not fall in the street and the plows do not need to come around, your car will receive a ticket for illegal parking during those hours.

To me this is ridiculous, given that most of the houses that college students live in do not have much of a driveway. This also means that several students are living under one roof and as upper classmen, the majority own cars.

So where do they expect six to 10 cars to dis- appear to overnight? Do they expect us to on our front lawn?

I understand that there are lots for overnight parking, but this really only benefits the houses that are located near these areas. Parking multiple blocks away from my house at night is not helpful or convenient in any way. That also makes me feel uncomfortable and unsafe, especially because it gets extremely dark out very early at night during this season.

The idea of this winter parking ban unless you have a permit irks me especially because it directly affected one of my housemates Allie Gallaner said “In the middle of a snow blizzard, I had no other option but to park not even three yards away from a legal area. This left me with no way to class the next morning because my car was towed. No mercy was shown. I missed an extremely important lecture and was left without

grocery money for the week because of how expensive the tow service was.”

I am not an unreasonable person. The roads obviously need to be plowed. What gets me is the fact that only a few years ago, there was a law that cars could park on alternate sides. This means that everyone had to park on one side of the road one night and then the other side the next night. For what- ever reason, this did not work.

However, this year there is a new rule that one person form each household is allowed to purchase a parking permit to legally park on the road for $75. This is frustrating because this is just a money scam, when the town could easily just go back to the free alternate parking law. Think about it this way: if one person at every single house purchases this permit, and all of these houses are located close together, that means that either way, cars will be lining up the street.

Although this parking permit will cause less cars to be on the road than normal, they have the freedom to park on either side and be scattered. The town is going to get experience into more of a problem because cars will legally be allowed to park on both sides of the street with this permit, which does not solve any problem for the snow plows.