With the start of the new semester at San José State, I can’t help but notice the terrible parking situation and the need for better public transportation options.
Students often have mental breakdowns – myself included – when they find themselves circling the parking garages, creepily following anyone who looks like they’re walking to their car and leaving for the day.
You awkwardly stick your head out of the car door and ask anyone if they are going to leave with the hope that they will answer, “Yes, take my spot, please!”
Then you finally snatch a spot, and you praise everything and everyone you believe in as you run to make it to class on time.
As a solution to this problem, SJSU opened the South Campus Garage on 10th Street which provides an extra 1,480 parking spots, according to SJSU’s Parking Garage webpage.
For students with disabilities, there are 20 parking spots available, according to the same website.
However, it is 1.4 miles away from campus, so students have to take charter and shuttle buses from the parking garage to the main campus.
The shuttle comes every 5 to 10 minutes and though the overall experience of it isn’t bad, it isn’t ideal. It takes an additional 10 minutes to get to the parking lot or to campus, adding on more time to a student’s commute.
At the start of the semester, the shuttle becomes packed, often resulting in a bus that is filled to the brim with sweaty and stressed out students.
Parking is not the only problem students face with transportation. Students can use DoubleMap Bus Tracker, a bus tracking app, to track the status of buses but it has been down since the beginning of the semester.
This situation has me thinking, “What if it were possible to get to school without as many parking and transportation issues?”
Having an option other than driving to school and dealing with parking would be ideal, such as taking BART or Caltrain.
As a commuter school, there are students and faculty members coming in from all over the Bay Area. Nearly 43% of students commute from Santa Clara, while the remainder either commute from the East or South Bay area, according to the SJSU website.
Also, nearly 845 students commute four days out of the week, according to a Fall 2023 survey by SJSU Associated Students’ Transportation Solutions Survey.
I drive one hour to and from school four days a week as a commuter from San Francisco.
Not only am I using precious gas during these commutes, but I am also wasting time that I could use on homework and other class assignments.
At the beginning of the semester, I had to leave almost two hours early to account for parking.
It can be tiresome for students who have to commute numerous times a week, find parking and on top of that be stressed about school and work.
The school could at least try to alleviate this issue by making parking free for students or by having enough parking since SJSU is a commuter school.
At the very least, it would be nice to come to school and know that there is a parking spot waiting for you on campus.
Moving to San José is not an option for many students because the cost of living exceeds the price of gas and the time we spend commuting.
Students living with their parents spend an average of $1,611 on transportation in one academic year, according to California State University 2023-2024 Cost of Attendance survey.
Ideally, students coming from around the Bay Area could take BART or Caltrain to get to campus and spend the time in transit doing homework and not wasting as much gas money.
Although BART reaches San José, the station closest to SJSU is the Berryessa-North San José which is 20 minutes away from campus on the VTA.
Caltrain also reaches San José but the nearest station is 15 minutes away on the VTA.
The best situation would be a public transportation station coming to SJSU or being within walking distance.
The good news is a new project, VTA’s BART Silicon Valley Phase II, will expand the BART service six miles from the Berryessa Transit Center, according to the VTA website.
Unfortunately, it seems like commuter students will have to wait for a long time until this plan actually starts running.
This project is estimated to be able to carry 54,600 commuters each day by 2040, according to the same website.
In a perfect world, the school would try to alleviate this problem for students by making parking less of an issue.
For starters, having a space guaranteed if you are paying for a permit would be nice, or at the very least, making it more affordable for students.
