A Student Publication of the University of Hawai`i • Honolulu Community College • November 2015
Traffic troubles MR
Parking Lot 1, above, often fills up by mid-morning, but there's plenty of space available in Lot 8, below, just a few blocks away.
New fence, building mean parking will be a longer walk away By Vania Graves And Quintin Smith
Ka L� staff writers
It’s 10 a.m. Thursday at Honolulu Community college, and there’s a traffic jam getting into the student parking lot. Cars sometimes get backed up all the way to Dillingham Boulevard. Every one is frustrated. Trying to park every morning, it seems, is a new every-day problem for students. It’s gotten bad lately, andi it might get even worse next semester. While parking has always been tight around campus, it suddenly got very cramped this semester when city officials eliminated many free parking stalls along either side of Kapalaama Canal by putting up a fence intended to
keep homeless people from camping in the area. This took away the free street parking that many students had gotten used to having. School officials had supported the idea of putting up a fence as a way of cleaning up the surrounding neighborhood Some of the students, such as Emily Lange, a first year student, think the parking situation on campus is “kinda awful.” Another first-year student, Walter Shoal, agrees: “In the morning, parking is alright, but around 10 a.m., it gets nuts.” That’s when many students arrive for mid-morning classes, only to find most of the student parking spots already filled, or slowly emptying of early-morning arrivals. The situation is likely to get much more difficult in the Spring
Semester, when the school is scheduled to begin construction of a new science building on the site of what is now parking lot 1, next to Building 7. We went to the administration for an answer to students parking frustrations. Derek Inafuku, vice chancellor administration services, explained that although the fence along the canal and the new science building will take away parking, his hands are tied.
However, “We are working hard, trying to figure out diffent ideas of what we can do,” he said. “Students are our priority.” School officials say one solution is for more students to use Lot 8, which is located a long block away from campus, next to the automotive/diesel facility. It’s about a five-minute walk from the campus, and right now, the lot has plenty of open space.
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