Instagram Account the New Bad Parking Police?

Photo courtesy of Hannah Deibert

Unevenly parked cars in the SCHS parking lot indicate the presence of newbie drivers. Officer Ryan Douglas, Silver Creek’s SRO, noticed the poor parking in the lot and has seen the parking page himself. Officer Douglas says, “If you get down to the edge of the parking lot and look down the line where all the cars should be lined up to, they are all over the place”.

Hannah Deibert, Staff Writer
November 9, 2021

The “SCHS Bad Parking” Instagram account has become notorious for featuring and exposing the students of Silver Creek that take the white lines as a suggestion. However, the account may push students to straighten out their parking jobs and highlight issues within the parking lot. 

 

The Instagram page schs_badparking was started in spring of 2021 and has quickly gained almost 800 followers. The ownership of this page has remained anonymous, but credits their inspiration to Niwot High School who created a similar page. In an exclusive interview with the anonymous owner, it was disclosed that they receive anywhere from one to four photos of bad parking per day. 

 

Often, the owner compiles all these posts together to make a post. They inform, “A good post is a couple of really bad parking jobs, with a funny and passive aggressive caption”. At the start of the school year, senior Maggie Shrader found herself on the page. 

 

Shrader was running late to school when she tried to parallel park in the spots closest to school. After multiple tries and no mirrors, she just left her car even though she was clearly over the curve. It didn’t take long for someone to snap a photo of her car and for it to end up on the SCHS Bad Parking page. Shrader said she expected this the second she parked that bad.

 

Shrader says she still parks in the parallel spots but feels like she has gotten a lot better. She expresses, “Maybe the embarrassment has pushed me to be a better parker”. Officer Ryan Douglas, Silver Creek’s Student Resource Officer (SRO), shares this thought process, “An example of public shaming to try and get a better result”. 

 

Officer Douglas reports that there was hope for Silver Creek parking with new plans for an improved parking lot. Instead of ninety degree spots, they would be replaced with slanted spots, to allow for easier parking. There would also be a new flow of traffic implemented in order to ease traffic. This plan, however, was discarded due to COVID. 

 

A change is much needed. The parking lot sees about 2 accidents per week according to Officer Douglas. This gives some reason to be nervous about parking in the lot. Admin of SCHS bad parking shares that, “I think the parking in the student parking lot is comical, but with all of the new drivers I admit I’m always nervous parking”. 

 

Officer Douglas says that this issue of bad parking extends to parents. Looking through the page he pointed out some parking jobs he thought were parents waiting after school. Douglas also cuts newbie drivers some slack because he knows some of the past parking jobs on the page can be blamed on the snow. “You can’t see the lines when it snows, I can see that the ground is totally wet, that means that there was probably snow on the ground that melted.” 

 

Hopefully a remodeled parking lot is in the future for Silver Creek, but in the meantime SCHS Bad Parking will keep drivers in check.