Modern issues peculiar to the U.S. college system go far beyond the quality of education and the practical relevance of skills and competencies. For instance, educational institutions’ infrastructure and the degree to which it meets service consumers’ needs should also be considered to benefit students. This paper will discuss the absence of parking lots that personally affects the author.
The absence of parking spaces to accommodate all college students using personal transport is a major issue that influences students’ satisfaction with education. With more and more individuals giving preference to cars, colleges’ parking lots become overcrowded. When all parking spaces are occupied, students face difficulties when searching for another spot that would enable them to park legally without blocking the traffic or pedestrians’ movement. In many instances, doing this might require superior driving skills. Moreover, from the psychological perspective, the current situation with colleges’ parking capacity can negatively affect interactions between students while also creating another source of stress that might affect both well-being and academic performance. From personal experience, long rows of cars trying to find at least any available parking spot create a unique type of competition that results in open conflicts. Finally, students might also feel urged to plan their daily activities in a peculiar way, including arriving at college much earlier than needed.
Aside from individual-level complaints, today’s researchers recognize the scarcity of parking spaces for students, which reveals the parking space crisis. According to Wang et al. (2020), campus parking problems have increased globally, stemming from insufficient consideration given to parking demand forecasts and limited amounts of land for new parking lots. Nevertheless, the key contributor to the ongoing crisis is both teachers’ and students’ increasing use of personal transport instead of public transportation, which reduces traffic congestion (Wang et al., 2020). Thus, colleges’ inability to provide enough parking spaces is widely acknowledged.
In summary, parking spaces’ limited availability affects college students in various ways. Given the parking crisis’s possible social and psychological outcomes, the cited problem requires close consideration and step-by-step solutions. Such measures should effectively incorporate colleges’ parking space demand forecasts into their infrastructure development endeavors.
Reference
Wang, X., Wang, Y., & Hu, C. (2020). About the optimized design of the parking space on the campus of a college. American Journal of Computational Mathematics, 10(2), 221-229. Web.