Students have lost more parking due to construction on a new lot alongside Bison Inn and to 11 spaces in the Bison Inn lot now designated to guest and head resident spaces.
There has not been clear communication to Bison Inn residents as to when they are, or are not, allowed to use these spots when guests aren’t filling the rooms in the inn.
“Unless there’s a name in the little slot, you can park here during the day; we just say no overnight parking,” said Bison Inn senior manager Anamarie Knapp. “It may be that somebody’s coming in at seven a.m., and we can’t have a car sitting there for two days.”
Lipscomb University boasts 2,657 spaces for students to park in, but after removing reserved spaces (such as faculty/staff, guest, handicap, head resident spots, compact vehicles, academy students, and VP), the average student can only park in 2,225 of the spots available in lots owned by the university.
In 2016, the university had 4,680 students enrolled, making the student-to-average-parking-spot ratio 2.1:1.
With 2.1 students to each parking space, many students have resorted to parking outside of the lines. Tickets are still given for cars left outside of lines, even if the vehicle is not in an explicit no-parking zone.
“The intent of a ticket is not to collect money, the intent is to correct an action,” head of security Patrick Cameron said. “If I can get you to stop doing what you’re doing by a warning ticket, I’m all for it. The reason for tickets is to prevent people from continuing an action that puts the safety of others at risk.”
Cameron exhorts students to take advantage of the programs security has to offer, such as the shuttle programs for commuters, or Bison Walk.
“The university’s growth has outpaced our parking,” Cameron said. “One of the biggest things we can recommend is for boarding students — we want them to have priority because they live here. Our commuter students — we really need them to utilize our shuttle programs, rather than coming to campus.”
“We’re working very hard to communicate through our new website [and] through our weekly parking emails. We really need folks to pay attention to those,” Cameron said.
Real time updates are available at parkingstatus.lipscomb.edu.
I feel like the students that live on campus, should be the ones to park in Stokes saying that they only move their car once or twice a week. It’s not fair that commuters have to park off-campus when they pay to come to the school also. And Do not get most of the benefits that people that live on campus do
As a commuter student, I feel offended. If you’re asking commuter students NOT to park on campus in order to give higher priority to “boarding” students, then that’s not fair. Commuter students, majority of them, are using family income to pay for majority of their school. We deserve to park in the same places as your typical “boarding” student does. Why not enforce a “no on campus” car policy to the incoming freshman and sophomores and just allow upperclassmen to keep their cars on campus? What percentage of Lipscomb students live on campus and are utilizing a parking space to park their car? Now how often do they actually leave campus? Why can’t you ask “boarding” students to utilize carpooling situations whenever they want to leave campus on a Friday night? As commuters, we do the best that we can to find parking on campus. Me, personally, I wake up 5:30am every day and get to campus almost 1 hour before my class starts JUST to secure a parking spot on campus, because I do what I can do make my Lipscomb student life convenient for me. There are other students who do the same thing. Some commuters end up sleeping over campus to keep their parking spot from the previous day. Can you believe that? How do you expect Lipscomb University commuters to become more involved on campus if you are asking commuter students to NOT be on campus? How are we supposed to break the gap between commuter and student involvement and create a more inclusive culture if you are asking us to utilize the most inconvenient methods of transportation? I will continue to park on campus wherever I get a parking spot because I deserve it just as much as the traditional “boarding” student.
Before completion, Bison Inn was falsely advertised as “designated parking for residence”. I’ve been very disappointed lately because of this parking lot issue and i know Lipscomb is not going to try to fix it. They’ll probably keep taking more spots to give to guests and make those unnecessary mobile offices.
Hello, I strongly disagree with the statement saying commuters should be the ones not coming to campus, using the parking when they are the ones that need to actually arrive to campus for classes. Others live on campus, they walk to their classes. Commuters actually have to use their cars twice a day apon arrival and departure from campus. A 10-15 minute walk from Stokes in the Nashville weather is difficult and many of them are having to have someone walk them/drive them there because they don’t want to walk in the dark alone. On campus students have a right to on campus parking just as anyone else and vice versa. Telling commuters to park somewhere other than campus because they arent “priority” isn’t logical at all.