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One of the biggest complaints undergraduates have about UCLA is the lack of parking. While not having a car can sometimes be a little annoying, the limited parking situation for undergraduates is actually very beneficial to both students and the campus as a whole.

Most importantly, the lack of parking is a major reason why UCLA hasn’t turned completely into a commuter school, along the lines of UC Riverside and Cal Poly Pomona. If everyone had cars, UCLA would clear out on the weekends and become a ghost town. Westwood would become emptier than a movie theatre showing “Gigli.” Our nightlife and social scene would just not be the same.

Being a vibrant and tight-knit community is part of what makes our school unique. It’s something everyone notices when they come here on tours or business trips. Wherever you go around campus, you will find students doing what college students should be doing: studying in the libraries, going to student group meetings, hanging out around Bruin Walk, going to UCLA sporting events, seeing movies together and socializing at bars and restaurants.

You don’t see the same kind of vibrant student community at commuter schools because students are never around, except for when they have classes a few times a week.

Creating enough parking for undergraduates would effectively open the floodgates. Not only would more students leave on weekends, but many students whose parents live in the L.A. area would be more inclined to live at home and commute to school. Other students would rent apartments far off campus in places like Santa Monica. Even students who live in Westwood would start to drive their cars to class.

The main reason why people rent apartments away from campus is because they are usually cheaper than Westwood apartments. However, the couple hundred dollars saved on rent is more than cancelled out by quarterly parking fees, gas money and wasted time spent in traffic.

The already traffic-plagued streets around UCLA would become even more jammed by cars. The two-lane streets that go around the Village simply aren’t designed to handle tens of thousands of students driving to and from classes every day.

Considering the current state’s fiscal crisis and the massive UC budget cuts that have come with it, creating more undergraduate parking should not be on anyone’s priority list. Additionally, because UCLA is confined, without any room to expand, new construction projects require demolishing existing structures.

The most recent example of this is the parking lot under the Intramural field. Undergraduates lost the use of one of the largest and most important athletic fields on campus for over two years to build this parking lot. This kind of tradeoff is unacceptable.

The fact is undergraduates don’t need cars to have a complete college experience. In fact, if everyone had cars, it would really subtract from undergraduates’ college experiences.

Everything students need is within walking distance in Westwood. Many students use bicycles, skateboards and scooters to make these distances even shorter. Students who need to get all the way across campus use Campus Express buses that run every 10 minutes.

Students really only need automobiles to get to a few locations like the airport, Third Street Promenade and sporting events. However, buses that run from early in the morning to late at night go to all these locations. They do not justify building tens of thousands of more parking spaces.

The main group the limited parking situation at UCLA affects is the minority of students who live far away from campus and complain they can barely get parking. First of all, UCLA already provides 7,000 parking spots, available solely to undergraduates, which more than suffices for these students’ needs. Additionally, the dormitories currently under construction will soon increase the amount of on-campus living space for undergraduates, leading to fewer students living off campus. A more constructive way for these students to approach the issue would be to change their living situations to be closer to campus instead of trying to change UCLA’s parking situation.

Especially in a city plagued by traffic problems like Los Angeles, it would serve the younger generation well to get used to using alternative means of transportation.

In the end, creating more parking spaces won’t help undergraduates at all. It would only serve to drive students even farther away from campus – and from each other.

Bitondo is a third-year political science and history student. E-mail him at mbitondo@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.