Rob A. Karr
If you are a human being who attends Binghamton University you know all too well that to move from place to place you have to either use your legs or a vehicle with either two, three, or four wheels. If you’re one of these people, then this is the article for you! Traveling around campus can be a tough task. Students encounter many different situations, but inevitably everyone will encounter these two main issues: loose pavers and parking problems.
Parking Paranoia:
If you’re a freshman you may want to skip over this section or stay if you want a sneak peak of what’s waiting for you in the future.
It’ll come as no surprise that owning a car and attending Binghamton University is like trying to mix water and oil: it just doesn’t work. Oftentimes, owning a car in Binghamton will make you question why you even got your driver’s license in the first place! Owning a car up in Binghamton is SO BAD, it’s hard to come up with a list of positives. This section is called “Parking Paranoia” for a reason, people!
But what’s there to be paranoid about? Well, everything.
The paranoia kicks in right after you’re done lugging inside all your dorm room decor (blankets, pillows, plants, Weezer’s 30th Anniversary Blue Box Set featuring 36 previously unreleased tracks, and things of that nature). Did you buy your parking pass? If not, your car’s already been ticketed for a parking violation despite being there for 25 minutes.
Once you sort that out and fork over the $150 plus for the Residential parking pass, it’s great to know that you’re limited to parking in less than half of the available parking lots. To make matters worse, students with Commuter parking passes can park in the residential parking lots, leaving you nowhere to park! Keep that in mind when you randomly park by the East Gym to get a run in, promptly forgetting that you parked in a commuter lot and have a fat $40 ticket sitting underneath your windshield wiper. Or when you feel like going to grab Chipotle at 1 pm on a Tuesday and come to find that your entire residential parking lot is filled to the brim, forcing you to do the walk of shame back to your dorm from Lot H.
God forbid you park in a Commuter lot or forget to put your flashers on when unloading groceries from your car, Binghamton’s Secret Police, Parking Services, will be there to swiftly hand you a ticket and move on to their next victim. Seeing a Parking Services car is the equivalent of seeing a cop car roll past a house party: If you’re breaking the rules you know what’s coming your way.
If Parking Services wasn’t bad enough, they even hate disabled people!
Paver Problems:
Walking, as most humans do, can be tough. What’s even tougher than walking is walking on paving stones. You know, those little stones that aren’t bricks, but are brick-like, but also aren’t brick colored. For the sake of cutting corners, Binghamton University chose to use paving stones as the primary walkway for nearly all of campus. That means tens of masons had to endure the BRUTAL Binghamton weather, painstakingly laying tens of thousands of cheap paving stones for the intelligent and bright students of this university to use.
However, paving stones suck. They erode quite quickly, come loose from their mortar often, and consistently crack under the weight of the maintenance trucks that plow the pathways in the frigid Binghamton winter. The Paver Problem is a never-ending cycle.
Phase 1: Crack the Paver
Since pavers are so cheaply made, they crack easily. Prime examples of pavers cracking include but are not limited to snow plows, box trucks, fat people, and things of that nature.
Phase 2: Neglect
Once a paver is cracked, it goes neglected. In a perfect world the grounds crew would swiftly swoop in and mark the paver as cracked, replace it, and go on with their day. But unsurprisingly (it is Binghamton after all), that doesn’t happen. Usually, the paver has to be cracked or loose for about 3 months before it goes noticed by the grounds crew.
A rite of passage as a Binghamton student is walking on a normal rainy day and stepping on a loose paver, causing a splash mixture of dirt and rainwater to soil your trousers, ruining your outfit for the Lockheed Martin job fair. That’s a certified Binghamton classic!
Despite not fixing the pavers right away, you have to have some sympathy for the grounds crew. It’s not their fault that the walkways are made of pavers. That decision is way above their pay grade. And don’t forget about the one poor soul they send out onto the Spine to fix the 167 loose or cracked pavers in an attempt to prevent the Spine from looking like the Highway of Death.
As walkers and drivers, who’s to blame? Who do we as a student body struggling to navigate campus throw all out ill toward? Probably Baxter…