Law and Order in the Streets

There is no comfort, besides good weather, that the Cambridge City Council does not provide for Cambridge residents. When those people happen to be tax payers, the Council is anxious to please them even to the point of injustice to other, less tax-fertile inhabitants. And when this latter type of resident happens to be a Harvard student City Hall's concern for the comforts of the former is of maniacal stature.

The latest clash of interests centers about parking space. It seems that tax-type citizens object to members of Dunster and Leverett Houses usurping the streets that surrounded those Houses. City Councillor Sullivan sides with the taxpayers. He figures that they should have the advantage of those parking spaces, despite the fact that it is theoretically as illegal for tax-payers to park there as it is for students. But anyone who has beaten the system by parking overnight--without ever being ticketed--on those streets that are generally filled with Massachusetts license plates know that theory is a very relative thing with the Cambridge police.

Councillor Sullivan has long had Harvard's interest in view, in his sights one might say, and his annual Spring Parking Drive has always been a sign that good weather is not far away. This year he has been urging that only seniors be allowed to bring cars to Harvard. This is one solution. But the simplest is ever the best, and a much simpler way of solving the parking problem is evident. Harvard should foreclose the mortgages and end the leases it holds in the vicinity of the University, turning the vacated land into parking lots. There really is something wrong in a City Councillor making it easy for people to break the law--especially voting people. And turning Harvard students out of their illegal parking places only to fill them with tax-payers would be abominable, positively sinful in fact. Clearly, parts of Cambridge should be turned into a vast parking lot, particularly that choice, but so-far misused land just northwest of Central Square.