During my freshman year, I followed a short-lived Instagram account called “DeLaSalle Bad Parking.” The account was pretty much what it said it was: it documented some regrettable parking in the DeLaSalle lot, and everyone would make fun of the unknown driver in the comments. While the parking fails on that account were funny to me at the time, when I was yet to even take a driver’s ed class, now the account painfully sticks out in my mind every time I enter the Nicollet Island Pay Lot: a largely unmarked slab of concrete that has become the living nightmare of anyone who wasn’t fortunate enough to get a main lot pass.
It should be no surprise the pay lot is a very stressful environment to park in. It’s full of freshly licensed drivers that are usually in a rush to park, which results in some questionable solutions to the pay lot being at capacity when they arrive, parking decisions that can trap others in the lot until the individual responsible moves their car (you know who you are). What makes matters even worse is the ease of making imaginary parking spots in the lot, as much of the paint that initially marked the spots has eroded away over time, meaning that the real spot markers are really in the eye of the beholder.
This catastrophic scene may pose the question: What can DeLaSalle do about this? The answer: Not a whole lot. Even if the majority of its weekly traffic is student parking, the pay lot is a Minneapolis public parking lot, which isn’t under De’s jurisdiction. The eternal Minneapolis parking struggle simply bleeds onto the island, whether we like it or not.
But something happened that made me think about the Pay Lot differently. I’ve been driving to school since I finally got my license this past summer, and I park in the pay lot. One day, after being stuck in traffic, I arrived in the lot some time around 8:10 AM. A majority of the spots had been taken by that point, and I was struggling to find anywhere to park. As I was pulling around a row of cars, I saw two things: an available spot right in front of me, and someone driving into the lot also nearing the spot. I rushed to the spot, getting there as efficiently as possible without hitting anything or anyone, and not particularly caring about cutting someone off. As I pulled into the spot, I felt a sense of victory. But not for long.
The moment after, it dawned on me. The pay lot was making me evil.
In my pursuit of a parking spot I had forgotten any consideration I had for my fellow students, fellow drivers, fellow humans. I was already going to be late for school that day, there was no reason for that parking spot to matter so much.
But even outside the trials and tribulations of parking in the pay lot, this incident got me thinking: Is driving in general making me a worse person? It didn’t take a ton of searching to find out that my thought had some truth to it. As many of us are aware, driving is inherently dangerous, a fact made apparent by all the videos shown in driver’s ed that depict every terrible way driving can kill us. Even if we’ve been driving for decades, the danger still registers in our brains, making us angrier and more emotionally volatile, which is further exacerbated if we’re in a time crunch, like, hypothetically, if we woke up 10 minutes late for school.
I set out to write this article to express my complaints about how truly awful the Pay Lot can be, which, obviously, I still have. In the process, however, it made me realize that the pay lot is simply a symptom of a larger problem; that we often have to drive everywhere, even if we know parking will be a pain, even if we know that driving can make us a worse version of ourselves. A lot of students live far enough from school to the point where public transportation is often impractical or impossible, and the school’s busing only works both ways if you don’t have anything after school. This is a direct result of the car focused infrastructure in not only the Twin Cities, but America as a whole. I still want the Pay Lot to be better, but I also want us to have more options. We need less driving so that our cities are made for people rather than cars, so that we don’t have to reckon with the inherent dangers of driving, and, most importantly, so we no longer have to park in the Pay Lot.
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