Disclaimer: This is a satirical piece.
By Kourtney Husnick
Parking at Cleveland State University is, without a doubt, the most frustrating and unpleasant part of the student experience.
Lots fill up way too often. Parking passes are too expensive. Some of the garages are falling apart. Students who park here, or even walk by the parking garages, know how bad it is. Parts of parking garage ceilings fall when the wind blows too hard. It’s a hazard.
Luckily, the solution is clear. We must call upon the administration to make the right choice and build a new parking garage.
Some might ask where this parking garage should go. That, too, is obvious.
We should tear down the Washkewicz College of Engineering for a parking garage tower. It’s the perfect plan.
The garage could be planned to break the world record for the tallest parking garage. It would become Cleveland’s new greatest attraction and the new greatest resource on Cleveland State’s campus.
We could contribute to building up the city and add another breathtaking tower to our campus. The university already has one of the tallest towers located on a college campus with Rhodes Tower.
If we keep adding more, we can both utilize the minimal extra building space we have at our disposal and also try to become the college campus with the most towers.
More importantly, the location would make it the new most popular parking garage on campus. It’s right on a main road. It’s next to Main Classroom. There’s no possibility that this plan could fail. The convenience alone would make parking at Cleveland State a great experience.
Additionally, the parking garage tower would become a major source of revenue for the university. We always hear about budget cuts and financial struggles. Let’s offer the administration a solution.
Everyone who drives here knows the struggle of finding a parking spot on campus when literally any event is happening downtown. With a huge new parking resource right near the highway, we could actually handle having students and Cleveland’s visitors parking on campus.
People might argue that it would make the university’s donors angry to tear down a new educational building for more parking, but there’s a solution for that as well. We would simply put the donors’ names on the new parking garage.
Students would be thrilled to have such a huge problem fixed on campus, and everyone would be thankful for the change. It would make the donors look great.
The building might be new, but that actually makes it easier to part with if a parking garage takes its place. No one is used to it yet. It’s not even entirely finished. We can’t miss something we never really had, so getting rid of it now is absolutely the best option.
Another great result of this plan is that it would provide more work at the university and throughout the community. We would be creating jobs. Construction workers would be hired. Student employees would later be hired to work in parking services because we would need a larger staff.
More jobs, more university income and more parking spaces are all major benefits. Any possible downsides would be minimal and easy to solve.
If Cleveland State wants to keep expanding, we need more parking. There are no other decent options to fix this problem.
As someone who has literally never had to park on this campus — or anywhere else for that matter — I can say with full authority that building a new parking garage tower is the best plan for the university. Clearly, someone who is purely objective about the topic would have the most useful viewpoint.
I have never even had my license. That’s about as objective as anyone can possibly get about solving a parking problem.
The current plan of extending the parking’s management out to a private company cannot be our solution to this disastrous parking problem. Students would never be protected. Prices would rise, and parking decisions would be made with focus staying solely on profits.
Knocking down a currently underutilized, and therefore obviously obsolete, building for a tower that would essentially double Cleveland State’s parking space is a much better plan.
If anyone has disagreements, it will be the engineering students and faculty. If the rest of the university’s population is ready to handle that fight, we can win.
We can fix the parking problems. We can become everything Cleveland State is meant to be. We can solve a problem that runs through most inner-city college campuses and prove everyone else wrong.
We don’t have to suffer like this. The students who drive don’t deserve to struggle to find a parking spot, and the students who don’t drive also don’t deserve to keep hearing the constant complaints from all the students who can’t find parking spots.