Park Your Car-cass

Three almost simultaneous actions have served to intensify the already acute shortage of parking facilities around the Square caused by the large enrollment this fall and by the unusually high proportion of students with automobiles. The University has closed completely to undergraduates the old parking lot at the corner of Holyoke and Mt. Auburn Streets, which now lies at least 75 per cent vacant. At the same time, faced with protests from House residents (presumably non-ear owners) the University has disallowed overnight parking in such areas as the Eliot-Winthrop quadrangle, while the Cambridge police have inaugurated a full-scale campaign to enforce the fire law which prohibits parking on any municipal street between 2 and 4 A.M. For many students who must have automobiles in Cambridge for commuting and other purposes and for those who drove to College from home with no idea of the situation that now confronts them, the lack of adequate parking facilities constitutes a crisis.

Business Manager Aldrich Durant has already indicated that large sections of Soldiers Field can be turned into parking spaces, including the H.A.A. lot which at present is worked anywhere near to capacity only on home game afternoons during the football season. Likewise, Harvard-owned reclaimed marsh land back of the Business School is now serving no important function and could be utilized to stable hundreds of automobiles. The former University Parking Lot, from which all students were evicted when work began on an addition to the Hygiene Building, should be reopened just as soon as possible for as many vehicles as can be squeezed in. This lot has been operated for some time under complete student management, a system which Lehman Hall endorses and which might well serve as model for future parking spaces on Soldiers Field and elsewhere.

Admittedly Soldiers Field and the Business School are a long way from the Yard, yet many commuters would prefer a routine 10-minute walk to the current matutinal scramble for places to park nearer their classes. Students living in the Houses or the Yard, on the other hand, should be particularly eager for a legal and dependable parking lot even at some distance, since they rely on their cars less for daily than for weekend travel. Whether run by the University or by a student group, an essential prerequisite for any such space is 24-hours-a-day supervision for which provision would have to be made. Obviously, parkers will have to pay a fee, although past experience at the University Lot, where the space-rent was only five dollars monthly, indicates that the cost can be kept well below the usual amounts charged by Cambridge garages.

Although solutions to the problem exist, only a prompt investigation by the Student Council will succeed in galvanizing University officials into immediate action. There is no doubt that pedestrians and drivers alike stand to benefit from any effective device for luring automobiles from the streets of Cambridge.