A student at St. Francis Xavier University has posted a video on social media calling on the school to address it’s parking problem.
Landon Morris is a third-year student at St. FX.
The move to paid on-campus parking, which came into effect in September, has been especially rough on students living in residence — like himself, he says.
Morris’ video has been shared nearly 250 times.
“A lot of people are really fed up with how the university treats its student’s like pay pigs,” he says. “I didn’t expect it to get as much traction as it did — but I’m really glad it did.”
The new paid parking means students can opt to pay $175 per semester to park in the university parking lots or $300 for the full academic year.
For students who can’t afford to purchase the entire year at once, they end up paying an extra 50 dollars — a move that Morris says is “swindling” students.
And that money doesn’t guarantee a parking spot.
For students parking overnight, only certain lots are available and Morris says they fill fast.
One of the larger overnight parking lots has to accommodate students from three different residences, he says.
While there are two off-campus lots that allow overnight parking, Morris says, he’s tried parking in one of them before and it was locked — even though he was told it shouldn’t be; he couldn’t find the other off-campus lot.
Now, he’s calling on the university to make a change and has even suggested a solution.
Many of the lots reserved for daytime parking are locked overnight, he says. By allowing students to park in some of the daytime lots overnight, the problem could be alleviated.
Morris points out that the university would likely counter this by arguing that this would cause problems for daytime parkers. But people parking during the day are having trouble finding a spot too, he says.
“They can’t say by leaving cars parked in daytime spots overnight that it would create an issue for daytime parking because there’s already a huge issue for daytime parking, so it can’t possibly make it worse.”
He points to an incident where one of his professors had to cancel class because they weren’t able to find parking on campus.
Though Morris says he was concerned about posting the video for fear of backlash or being targeted with parking tickets — which he’s already received several of — he decided to post the video because he knows a lot of students and staff feel the same.
He’s been directing others who take issue with the new parking fees to a petition started by another student over the summer. That petition focuses on daytime parking, but he says the two go hand-in-hand.
Since posting the video, Morris says he’s noticed the gate to one of the off-campus parking lots has been left open later.
