Recently an article called Dear Texas A&M Board Of Regents, It's Time To Stop Ignoring Your Studentswent viral. The article addresses a number of issues occurring at Texas A&M University due to the increase in student population.

I agree with all the points the author addresses in the article, but I think there is one point that needs to be stressed a little more and that is the issue of Texas A&M’s transportation department.

This year when I found out I was going to have a car to get to campus from my house I immediately got stressed. I knew I was going to have to pay a lot of money to get a parking pass and that I probably would not get a parking pass for a decent parking lot since I was registering a few days before the deadline and am an underclassmen.

But I could never have predicted it would be as bad as it currently is, two months into school.

I am paying $300 to park in Reed Arena, which is on west campus. Being an engineering major, all of my classes are on the complete opposite side of campus. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Reed Arena is the worst parking lot since it is so far from everything, has hundreds of parking spaces, and yet you’ll still have a difficult time finding a spot. There have been a number of times I have gotten to the parking lot at 10:00 am and drove around for over 15 minutes to finally find a terrible spot.

The worst part of this whole parking aspect of this is that sometimes I’m not even allowed to park in this lot that I have paid so much for. When Reed has an event, including all basketball games, they charge to park there even if you have a pass.

Not to mention game day means my car can’t be parked in that lot 12 a.m. the night before or at all during the actual day.

As I mentioned earlier, all of my classes are across campus and would take at least 35 minutes to walk to from where I park. Therefore, if I want to try and cut down commute time to class, I have to take a bus. However, there is exactly one bus route that goes from Reed Arena to the north side.

That means the bus is always full and almost never on time. There have been times when I have been at Reed Arena parking lot 30 minutes before my class starts and because of the bus, I still get to class late.

The app that tracks the buses’ locations is hardly ever accurate and constantly crashes. Not to mention my favorite, is when I’m waiting on a bus to arrive and know what time it should be there but then 15 minutes go back and I try and track it again to see why it’s so late just to see that it has completely disappeared for the map.

I love my school and I am excited that more and more people are interested in becoming perspective students, but the transportation department needs to start planning for this increase in enrollment yesterday.

I’m tired of getting up an extra 50 minutes early so I can commute to campus then to classes and still come into class late.