Opinion: Please Calm Down in the Parking Garage. Please.

Originally published in Vol 6, No 1 of The Dragon, March 2022

“We are skating on thin ice with Oracle.”

I park in Oracle Garage 320 every single day. I have done so ever since I got my license back in August. I didn’t get my parking permit immediately, I will admit (quite frankly, I thought the permit system was abandoned) but when I was made aware of the requirement, I applied and got one. It’s really not difficult. Just ask nicely and they’ll give you one.

Every day, I arrive at school and make the odd journey up the ramps to the third floor, just as the contract I signed when I got my permit asks me to do. I drive past dozens, possibly hundreds of empty parking spaces, all to get up to where I am supposed to park. I value the ability to park in that garage. I don’t want to lose it.

Every day, I park alongside a group of maybe 15 people who park next to the stairs. Some of them have permits, some of them don’t, and I know and understand that. I have seen them drive, for the most part, safely. Some of them are loud and show-off (after all, they are teenagers), but they don’t abuse the garage.

Now, I will freely admit that I do not follow all the rules. I go around the speed bumps and I go more than 5 miles an hour. When the rules are silly, it can be okay to break them. The Oracle Security people know that. I see going around the speed bumps and driving over the crawling 5 mile an hour maximum. However, when I say over 5 miles an hour, I mean 15, not 40.

Recently, I attempted to leave d.tech immediately at 1:42. On my way out of the garage, someone tried to pass me by driving through all the parking spaces to my left. I was not going slowly, probably around 15, and this person was almost certainly doubling that. When he was denied the opportunity to pass by the need to turn right around the corner he promptly honked at me and gave me the finger. Why?

Oracle Security has noticed people racing in the parking lots. I have seen people racing on Oracle Parkway. Again, why? If you want to race, do it literally anywhere else. Please. There are so many other, better places around here to do that (there are long, empty stretches of fantastic mountain road just a few miles away). Just please don’t do it on the property of an irritable private company who can decide whether or not to one day just up and tow all our cars out of there. 

I really do value my ability to park in the Oracle garage. My parents are not able to drive me in the morning or afternoon, and taking public transportation would mean leaving my house at 7:20 every morning; that’s nearly an hour and a half to go the 6 miles to school. And when I did bike to school freshman year, I would arrive home every day hot, sweaty, and exhausted. I take concurrent enrollment classes, I do off campus internships, I go places after school. I need the independence I get from driving myself to school to maintain my mental health, and as silly as that sounds, it’s 100% true. 

By racing in the Oracle garages and misusing them like this, my independence and that of dozens of other students is being put in check. Even if just 1 or 2 students are doing these things, Oracle is going to get angry. It is their property, and we can’t be misusing it like this. They give us permission to park there, and they could just as easily take that away.

So please, don’t ruin it for us. Don’t take away our ability to easily get to concurrent enrollment classes, jobs, sports, volunteer sites, internships, and all the other things we drive to after school. Don’t take away the little bit of independence that some of us rely on. And please don’t make it so that the current freshman and sophomores won’t have the option to express their independence and drive to school when they turn 16.

Please.