Among the most pressing issues University President Frederick Lawrence will have to tackle as he develops his strategic plan for the University is the conflict between the need to create a greener, car-free campus and a convenient and accessible one. This issue merits a serious conversation within the University community, and it should certainly begin soon.

According to the Campus Master Planning Project, whose website was last updated in March 2001, the total projected capacity for cars on campus is 3,228. The Master Planning Team and Steering Committee based this statistic on the potential construction of new parking garages, built on either new or existing spaces. 10 years later, the demand for the additional space that parking garages could provide remains.

While this goal makes sense environmentally and aesthetically—and certainly should not be wholly abandoned—this dated master plan did not take into account the recent and significant increase in the number of students that need reliable access to the main campus on a daily basis.

Now that the community understands first-hand the impact of a larger student body, the administration must reevaluate whether it can prioritize the reduction of cars as much as it would have liked to have done in years past. There has been a chronic overcrowding of cars on campus. More underclassmen are living on campus, pushing more upperclassmen off campus. This means that more upperclassmen will choose to commute to campus in their cars.

Mr. Lawrence and the administration must realize that this campus will soon no longer be able to comfortably hold the entire student body.

We hope that Mr. Lawrence and the administration will place value on both the accessibility and pedestrian-friendly nature of the campus and recognize that these issues will not prove to be mutually exclusive in our strategic plan.