Unless you are a professor, a member of the administrative staff, or have a building named after you or your family, parking on campus is a task best left to fools and madmen.
Parking services has no qualms about issuing tickets with inflated values. They'll even put a wheel lock on your car if you have more than two tickets, despite the fact it keeps your vehicle in the forbidden space longer. Sure, the people who work for parking services, the ones who give out the tickets, are only doing their jobs. It's not their fault parking on campus is an atrocity. They need to work like everybody else.
Don Andrae, manager of parking services and member of the Traffic and Safety Committee, said, "We've lost 3,000 spaces in five years... There are only 10,000 spaces for 26,000 students and 6,000 faculty."
The Traffic and Parking Committee, comprised of students, faculty and staff, definitely deserves some of the blame. They started the process of change claiming they wanted to make things better, and they came out giving us the metaphorical finger.
Yet, we bought it, and we're still buying it. We've allowed parking enforcement and regulation to become a big business. So we deserve the rest of the blame.
"I would be the first to admit that we have a problem. But we have to work together to satisfy student requirements," said Andrae.
Perhaps it's complacency, perhaps most of us just like giving money to the University, the answer isn't clear. What is clear is the current parking system is a quagmire of arbitrary space designations and unfair policing of those spaces. Do we need so many A and B lots? What's wrong with driving on Mell Street. between 7:30 a.m.-5 p.m.? Why can A and B permit holders park in C lots?
Registration for 2013-2014 permits begins July 1. You could pay the $60 for a C or $160 to be put in the lottery for a PC permit, or you could send the Traffic and Parking Committee an email demanding change. You could even say you won't purchase a pass until the cost for a permit is lowered to its 2010 price of $30 for a C permit. If you feel like it, remind them tuition has been increased, and there is less money to go around. After all, that's what this all about: money.
"We don't make any money from tickets," Andrae said.
According to Andrae, the current parking system has caused a reduction in the amount of money brought in by tickets, money which is put into the University's general fund, and that is a sign of the systems effectiveness.
For the 2011-12 academic year, Parking Services had a revenue of $611,000 from tickets. As opposed to the current 2012-13 academic year in which they only received $426,729.
"If anything, I should be hearing from the upper administration for losing money," Andrae said.
There are most certainly not enough spaces to go around. But controlling those spaces with a bureaucratic enforcement agency only serves to demean those of us who have to commute because they can't wait on a bus that takes thirty minutes to go just a few miles. We are more than willing to work with the Traffic and Parking Committee, but it has to show initiative too.
Having five students on your committee does not accurately represent the larger student voice. Asking us to rely more on Tiger Transit when the busses are anything but reliable is not right. They say they are always working to improve, so let's keep them on task.
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