This year will likely be remembered as The Year Timpview Started Construction, as well as The Year of Timpview’s Abysmal Parking. The current situation has forced many students to park on the side of the street, and thus attempt to perfect their parallel parking job, creating mass chaos among student drivers as well as some cringe-worthy parking. 

The scope students have of this issue has been exacerbated by social media exposure. School-themed (although unaffiliated) Instagram accounts are nothing new, and this year some select social media-oriented students have been having a field day. This has conceived the THS Worst Parking account. Other similar accounts cover subjects from shoes to new trends, but THS Worst Parking has almost triple the followers of most of its brother accounts. With this account being so popular, it has drawn a lot of attention from students and this begs the question: Has parking gotten better since the start of this account?

Some students might consider THS Worst Parking a motivating reason to improve their parking, so they might avoid the digitized scrutiny of their peers, however, some clearly see this as their claim to fame and purposefully worsen their parking job to make it on the page. This brings up the argument that accounts such as THS Worst Parking can cause more harm than good, by creating an incentive to worsen parking and get posted on the account. 

The Thunderbolt interviewed the owner of the account, who stated, “I feel like [the account has] made it a little worse, because people are like, ‘this is funny, I want my car on there.’” While this is an unfortunate circumstance, the owner has informed The Thunderbolt that this account is purely for fun, and if the owner feels like somebody is trying to be featured with their purposefully poor parking, they won’t be posted. 

While some people are attempting to get on the account, there are also many trying to stay off. The vast majority of people polled by The Thunderbolt who knew of the account insinuated that they were more cautious with their parking to avoid getting a feature on the account. 

The unofficial accounts that surround Timpview can be both harmful and entertaining, often at the same time. THS Worst Parking, many students hope, will serve as a way to improve our parking predicament rather than worsen it.