There's no doubt that August is in full swing and classes have started. With a huge number of new freshman on campus, 4,090 to be exact, there's definitely a new atmosphere on campus. With all of the chaos, a simple five minute drive to campus is more a 30 minute ordeal to even get in the parking deck.

I'm not degrading the VCU Parking employees at all. In fact, I think they are doing a fantastic job at their very stressful jobs. However, as a commuter who was late to class on her first day strictly because of traffic, I would like to see a better system in place for the heavy traffic flow.

To break it down for you, I live roughly 5 minutes away from campus by car. My first class on Thursday was at 3:30. I thought leaving my apartment complex at 2:50 would have been plenty of time, right? I was wrong.

I ended up getting to class around 15 minutes late, which is ultimately no big deal because it was the first day. However, driving around 30 minutes to even drive into the parking deck is a little ridiculous when I pay around $300 a semester to be able to park there at ease.

I also had to buy two parking passes, one for the morning and one for the evening. It's not really a big deal, the second one was only $45. What is stressful though is that it doesn't specify which parking decal is which, so when I went to my morning class at 9:00 a.m. on Friday, the gates wouldn't let me in.

After a few tries, a nice gentlemen helped me get in but the system just makes me really nervous to drive to school now. What if it doesn't decide to let me in the day I have an exam? As a college student I already have a ton of anxiety, so traveling to school everyday shouldn't be added on to the list of the many things I worry about.

There's one more thing. A lot of students at VCU who drive don't even buy parking passes. I have a few friends that live on W. Main and when school starts, they can almost never move their cars away from their houses because students who choose to "cheat" the parking system choose to park there instead and walk to class. I just think it's unfair to those who pay for the parking decal and for those who live on that street.

I get it, there are technical difficulties at time with the parking decals at times, people get into accidents, and traffic just comes out of nowhere. However I as a student who has to drive to campus, I would just like to see a better system put into place to control the flow of traffic on and off the road. I think it's great that there are so many people on campus getting one step closer to getting a degree, but I think VCU would be wise to build another parking deck on campus in the near future.