Steven Aronowitz drove to the Farm three years ago in a beat-up 1983 Honda Civic. He says having a car -- for trips to a local coffee shop, the beach and occasionally home to Auburn, Calif. -- was an essential part of his freshman experience.
Soon that convenience will be unavailable to freshmen. Seeking to ease Stanford's parking crunch, administrators announced in May that, starting in the fall of 2000, freshmen will no longer be sold parking permits. The new policy, they say, should free up several hundred parking spaces on the car-clogged campus, allowing more upperclassmen and graduate students to park near their residences.
Not every student thinks a car is necessary. Jeannie Kim, who graduated in June, says she lived happily without one for her first three years. Then, as a senior, she lived off campus and racked up about $400 in parking tickets when she couldn't find free spaces. "Parking here is really ridiculous," says Kim, "and if you eliminated about a fifth of the cars it would probably help."
But Aronowitz, undergraduate chair of the student senate, isn't convinced the freshman parking ban is the right idea. "What are we getting out of this, and what are we losing?" he asks. "We are losing part of the freshman experience and we are gaining a marginal increase in upperclass parking availability."
University administrators plan to expand the Marguerite shuttle routes and frequency and may offer a car rental program for students to offset the loss of parking privileges for freshmen.
Stanford has been unique among its peer institutions in letting freshmen keep cars on campus, administrators say. Just 16 percent of freshmen arrive with cars, but 48 percent have them by the end of their first year. A resident student permit for three quarters costs $70.
