Politicketing

The University appears to have decided that "cooperation" with the City on such issues as student parking may help to resolve such largely political struggles as the recent Quincy House permit delay. But it is unfortunate that it has also decided to avert possible future troubles by unnecessarily restricting student parking.

There is little doubt that the University has a legal right to impose its restrictions by fines or severer measures. The Dean's Office need only point to the general regulation that violations of University rules "will be dealt with as the Faculty or administrative board shall determine." Those who still complain are further reminded that students registering cars with the University are supposed to show that they have off-street parking facilities.

But the new rules, rather than solving parking problems, only put them a little farther out of sight. Certainly there has been some increase in the use of University and private parking lots, yet many students have simply moved outside the University's present grasp, and will continue to move as Yard cop patrols spread out further from the Square. This hegira only tends to distribute Harvard's public-relations difficulties over a wider area.

For it is hardly reasonable or fair for the University to enforce rules that overcrowd streets a few blocks away and leave nearby streets bare at night. A much more sensible solution, and one that seems to have worked well in the brief period it was tried here, was the alternate-side plan set up by the City Council. This temporary plan is still in operation in the rest of the city, and will probably be extended by the Council until the end of May.

Some streets in the vicinity of the Houses are, of course, too narrow for parking even on an alternate side basis, and these should be kept entirely free of cars. But on comparatively wide streets like Mt. Auburn and Boylston, and one-way streets like Plympton and Holyoke, one-side parking does not present any fire hazard.

The University should demonstrate its willingness to cooperate with Cambridge not by continuing to impose a harsh set of rules which spreads the parking problem over a larger area, but by enforcing the workable alternate-side plan that the rest of the city is now trving.

Were the University to impose a ban on all student cars, such a ruling would no doubt prove unenforceable. The parking regulations now employed are nearly as unfortunate and inconvenient for students as a total ban, and they fail to solve the problem of Harvard's relations with the residents of Cambridge. Until the city sees fit to change its own parking laws, there is no reason for the University to impose stricter ones. To enforce Cambridge's rules--and only Cambridge's rules--would satisfy both the city and the student driver.