For the most part, I had heard all of the compliants by Radford University students about how horrible parking was at RU and chuckled. After all, I was a commuter student and was pretty much guaranteed a spot in any of the yellow-tag zones scattered around campus. This past Monday changed that sentiment for me.

Before getting into my story, I will yield that being an off-campus student, the compliants by on-campus students about their parking woes tend to make me laugh. After all, they have massive-sized parking lots on the other side of the bridge one would figure would be able to house all of their vehicles but I have not seen the evidence for either side and as a result, am going on my own potentially-incorrect conclusions. The only problem that I do have with on-campus parking is that RU needs a new lot somewhere to avoid the ever-common problems that arise in the "flood lot."

And so, back to Monday.

I left my house with plenty of time to make my 10 o'clock course and drove down I-81 that was flowing at a reasonable rate. Took exit 109 and arrived in Radford with still a good deal of time left to be able to park, get out of my car and to class. Smiles around, as all I had to do was drive through one or two lots and find one of my nearly-guaranteed spots and take it.

Oh, if only things ended up that easy.

The first parking lot I dropped by was the giant one in front of Muse, the primary parking lot for most commuter students. Much to my surprise, every spot was taken and on top of that, there were four-to-five cars sitting in the lot waiting for whatever spot opened up first.

"Forget this," I thought. "I'll try some other lot. They can't all be full..."

A quick drive down Main past the WVRU sign and the bridge that leads off to the Dedmon Center and on-campus parking put me at the intersection of Main and Jefferson, where I took a glance at the parking lot near the cleaners to the left, which was packed to the brim. Even the lot shortly after the light was filled. That surprised me because that lot, which can fit what I would guess to be about 10 vehicles was loaded and, normally has a couple of spots open because very few people park at it.

"It's ok," I sighed heavily, waiting for the light to turn green. "Surely there is a spot or two in Lot M if all of these are taken."

Unfortunately for me, every current and former commuter student to ever attend RU was given the memo to be out on campus today and even Lot M was full. And like the Muse lot, there were about two-to-three cars in there waiting for someone to leave so that they could claim their spot.

At that point, I started to run out of options. I could try the lot down at the end of downtown which almost always has spaces for the poor saps like me that could not find a spot in the lots close to the university. But I wanted to find a place close to campus and thus avoiding a long walk that would almost certainly put me in class at the 10:10 to 10:15 mark.

Just then, the Good Lord reminded me of the lot at the top of Tyler next to the converted Philosophy and Religious Studies building and luckily, there were two spots there. I had a spot, thankfully, but one minute to get to my 10 o'clock course.

Parking conditions at RU need to change not only for on-campus students who have their own problems but also for us commuter students, who should not have to do what I did this past Monday, they should be able to pull up to campus and have to search through one or two lots to find a place for their vehicle.

Photo Credit: http://k41.pbase.com/u13/czsz/upload/42923386.P1030264.JPG