Forty-nine students registered to park on College Avenue were suddenly reassigned to new parking spaces at the beginning of the semester. The parking spaces along College Avenue, utilized by Lafayette College for permit parking in recent years, will be converted into a bike lane as a part of a larger Easton transportation initiative.
“We quickly relocated the 49 students that we had assigned to that area to open student parking lots on our campus,” said Jeff Troxell, the director of public safety.
According to Pacey Ely ‘26, one of the students impacted, he received an email from Assistant Director of Public Safety Sandra Rogers explaining that he was going to be given a new spot three days after he had registered for a Lafayette parking permit on College Avenue.
Ely was never formally notified by the school about the finalization of his new assignment; he discovered he had been reassigned to the Markle Parking Deck after checking his student portal.
“Just based on the abruptness of the email, it seems like they didn’t have the information before people chose to park,” Ely said. “That was sort of shocking to me.”
Rogers deferred comment to Marcus Gilbert, the parking operations manager for the City of Easton.
According to Troxell, Gilbert is the college’s point of contact on the College Avenue parking spaces and notified public safety of the new bike lane and removal of those spots, though Gilbert claimed he was not involved in the process.
“Unfortunately, I have nothing to do with the spaces being removed,” Gilbert wrote in an email.
According to Troxell, the parking spots are under the jurisdiction of the city of Easton and were part of a College Hill parking program that allowed Lafayette to use them.
”We’re fortunate and thankful that they allowed us to park student cars there, but now my understanding is that the plan is to put a bike lane in that area,” Troxell said.
The bike lane is a recommendation of the city’s Active Transportation Plan, which seeks to connect Easton neighborhoods to the downtown area via “active” forms of transportation, such as walking or biking, according to Ben Guthrie, a traffic engineer who worked on the plan.
For College Avenue specifically, the plan recommends converting the street’s low-demand spaces, like wide travel lanes and street parking, into a bike lane.
“You’ve got street parking that’s not very high-demand, maybe with seasonal fluctuations, maybe used by students at certain times of the year,” Guthrie said at a Sept. 11 Easton city council meeting. “In this limited transportation corridor, we don’t think that student parking is necessarily the best use of this space and the vision we came up with here is to repurpose that space for a buffered bike lane.”
In an email, Troxell wrote that the college wanted to accommodate “the demand for student parking requests.”
The college has been utilizing the College Avenue parking spaces for several years. According to Troxell, Public Safety approached the Easton parking authority to obtain use of all parking spaces from Williams Visual Arts to McCartney Street, a measure that was approved.
Elisabeth Seidel ’26 contributed reporting.
