Last weekend my daughter was home from college. She's taken up walking in the mornings, not because she needs the exercise (she has the metabolism of a hummingbird) but because she'd decided that it was easier to walk from her apartment to classes at the university than to circle the various parking lots, hoping to find an empty space. She likes to sleep in, and none of her classes start before 10 a.m. By that time, she tells me, there's not a prayer of finding a parking space within a mile of the campus. She also told me when I asked, that no, the university would not refund the $35 parking-sticker fee I'd paid for at the beginning of the semester. When her mother overheard, this instigated a rather animated family discussion about how much it could possibly cost to pave or gravel a 300-square-foot spot and how universities all over the country must be racking up big bucks by requiring students to have parking decals without providing adequate parking facilities. But that's another story.

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Labels: Think Tank

05 November, 2006