There are two sides to every story. For the story of Auburn University's parking services and the school's students, faculty and staff, the story is a lose-lose situation. And for this story, it's about shrinking the divide rather than finding a solution.
Don Andrae, parking manager at Auburn University, said it's a no-win struggle trying to provide parking for all the students, faculty and staff.
"Any college is going to have it that way," Andrae said. "I have counterparts at those schools, plus the ones I've been to in the past six years, and it's the same. You do not have enough parking."
For all the research that goes into designing a parking system, it comes down to simple math when faced with the integral issue: 26,000 is much greater than 3,000.
"Fact is, you've got 26,000 students, and for commuter students you only have about 3,000 parking spaces," Andrae said. "And you have 19,000 commuter students, so that doesn't work out very well. The thing we had to do was, since the demand was so high, you had to either increase the supply or decrease the demand. The supply is not going to increase any time soon, and even if it did, it would take five to six years to get that to the point it needs to be. I think, yes, for what we have, it's probably the best system that we could do."
But do the students care?
Parking problems are a common topic among students, because of the need to get to class. The issue for most of them isn't the number of parking spots; it's the convenience, or lack thereof.
"They have enough parking spots for everybody, because there's parking spots way out in the boondocks," said Omari Dear, junior in mass communications. "But the problem is just the convenience. You have to walk far. That's the issue. Yeah, for sure (it's a convenience problem).
"What I do also is sometimes I park where the park-and-ride picks up for the C-Zone by the intramural fields. And that's a good way to do it. I don't have to walk, I can just get on the bus and it takes me up there. But it takes longer."
Parking services is constantly looking at new ways to improve parking arrangements.
"(We're) constantly tweaking," Andrae said. "Starting the Proximate C parking has worked very well for the ones who won. What we're finding out is a lot of people are doing carpooling, which is very good. We'll probably tweak it some more as far as how we were doing it."
Some students, however, feel differently about the new PC Zone.
"I think that what they did this year with adding the PC Zone, they basically just took away the most convenient spots," Dear said. "And now they don't have people complaining because they don't really have a choice to park conveniently.
"But when we had the choice to actually park a little bit closer to campus and there was sometimes not as many spots there, that caused more of an uproar and people were complaining all the time. And now they're saying, 'Oh, we're getting less complaints,' but it's only because people aren't parking close, they just find a different way of doing it."
Not all students view parking services as an evil entity, however. Some acknowledge that they're doing the best they can with the resources they have.
"I feel like parking services is actually doing a good job," said Scott Seidband, graduate student in civil engineering with a specialty in transportation engineering. "Their job is to regulate what the parking is and what it's been established to be.
Still, students always have ideas they'd like to see implemented.
"They either need to make it where there's enough parking for everyone or make it where the whole system goes to a transit system and only the top head people get parking on campus," Seidband said. "The way they have it set up now, basically the people that work there or the faculty gets all the parking spots, and it's the students that suffer. And it shouldn't be like that because the students are the ones that are paying to go here. So they need to, I think first, look at the students' needs before faculty and staff."
Dear expanded upon his own personal ideas for parking reform.
"If I could change something, I would make parking free for all," Dear said. "Every parking spot free for everybody, except handicap parking, of course. But I think that we're students, we pay to come to this school, we should get to park close and get there... I mean, people are going to find where the parking spots are, and that's where they're going to go. And I think eventually it'll balance out and people will be like, 'OK, well I'm going to go to this lot today because this is where I usually find my spot,' depending on what time you go to class."
Andrae, who is no stranger to complaints, said he reads every email he receives.
"I get enough, so to speak, responses back when I send out those emails," Andrae said. "And I get some lengthy responses, and I read every one of them, respond to every one of them. Some of them have good ideas of what we can do."
Parking decks are a common suggestion, but that's not a feasible idea, particularly in terms of cost.
"The going rate for a parking deck in our area is $15,000 a space," Andrae said. "So if you take $15,000 a space and you take that times a 500-car deck, you're talking about $7.5 million If you go to the Board of Trustees and say, 'I need $7.5 million for a parking deck,' and Professor Jones comes in and says, 'I need $20 million for a classroom facility,' he's going to get his $20 million before I get my $7.5 million. (We're) low on the totem pole.
"We're trying to get this working. It's not something that can be done overnight."
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