Members of the Villanova community are blessed with a campus that provides extensive property, recreation fields and impressive buildings that students and faculty are free to enjoy. The campus itself is the site of numerous sporting events, both collegiate and intramural, as well as the remarkable fact that it is an arboretum, harboring various types of trees and foliage.

Which is actually problematic. The University is reluctant to remove any of the trees on campus in order to expand parking facilities, which makes finding a parking spot comparable to finding a needle in a haystack.

Perhaps the problem would not be so bad if there weren’t so many cars parked illegally in spots, merely taking up space with a glaringly obvious orange “boot” on their back tire. The problem could be helped to a degree if people without parking passes were not parking in the spots.

Yet the problem does not lie solely with the car-parkers.

Part of the problem comes from the fact that the parking and transportation services of public safety issue far more hang tags and passes than there are parking spots. Especially during second semester, West campus residents have been able to access hang tags more easily due to the fact that many students are studying abroad.

Yet are there enough more parking spots to accommodate all of these newly-issued parking permissions? Of course not. Which brings us back to square one.

Either the University needs to remove some of the foliage and pave the land in order to make more parking spots, or Public Safety needs to limit the number of parking permits that are issued per semester.

Sure, they do offer a 24-hour escort service that will protect any student who is wary about walking from Main campus to South or West during the wee hours of the morning or night. In addition, the shuttle should run through the parking lots on campus to pick up people who have parked far from their destination points.

Even students who live off-campus and drive to class every day need to take into consideration the time it takes to find a parking spot, which is inevitably in either the Pike Lot or the Septa Lot. Faculty and students who have been granted special permission to park on Dougherty Drive or other places where there is parallel parking oftentimes cannot park there either, due to cars parking either extremely far from the curb or half-way between two spots.

Maybe the blame is not entirely on public safety or the student drivers. Perhaps we should take up the matter of driver training with the DMV.