As anyone who has been around IU is bound to know, something must be done about the terrible campus parking situation. It seems to have only gone from bad to worse recently with the inception of a new tracking system — one more way for Parking Operations to further distance themselves from faculty, staff and students’ good graces.

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A couple weeks ago, a new system went into effect that will keep a close eye on all the parking offenders that “plague” IU’s campus. This system will track where permits are. For example, if a worker in Poplars scanned his permit at the garage in the morning, gave it to someone else registered under his permit, Parking Operations found the car elsewhere on campus and later the Poplars worker used the permit to get out of the garage, this would alert the system, and the worker would pay the price. Honestly, how many people does Parking Operations expect to catch with this costly system?

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Is it really worth the cost of people becoming more infuriated with the parking system, going so far as to get out of their cars and yell at the parking attendant at the end of the day? Instead of being waved through the garage at the end of the day and keeping a steady traffic pattern flowing, vehicles must come to a stop and swipe their permit, causing delay and backup through the garage. This is only bound to bring more headaches and complaints to all those affected. Is it really right to anger a lot of people to catch a few offenders?

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Parking Operations seems to take the stance that parking is a privilege, not a right. How can this be, when it's the students who pay tuition to come to this university in the first place? The faculty and staff have the right to parking too — they should be able to park close to their buildings without having to pay upwards of $200 per year for the “privilege” to park. What has this university come to, where people have to swipe their permits to get where they need to go?

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On average, Parking Operations makes more money from tickets than the City of Indianapolis each year. This should raise a red flag that the rules are overly strict and all they want is to make money. Since they are making all this money, why don’t they use it to do something to alleviate some of the parking hassles? Parking Operations should take the same money and spend it on something useful: more parking for all.