Students coming from off campus to park have often two major complaints: there seems to be nowhere to park and the price of permits seems to have gone up. It turns out students parking on campus could be right about both, depending on where they are parking and at what time.
Parking service manager Nancy Wray said spots are always available on campus because of the parking turnover rate, in which a spot is shared by different cars throughout the day.
“We don’t have any kind of wiggle room,” Wray said. “Every student is not here every day all day, so there’s turnover in there depending on the location.”
Wray said regardless of the amount of students who buy commuter spots every year, there is always parking available.
“We don’t ever have a limit on a commuter because we don’t say you can’t have a permit to park here, but the same thing happens for commuters,” she said. “You don’t have class every day all day, so there’s a constant turnover of the spaces but we don’t ever have a time when there’s no commuter spaces.”
On top of the frustration students have from parking hide-and-seek, seniors this year might notice that permit prices climbed every year since they were freshmen.
Parking prices have indeed gone up, but there are several major factors that play a role in the decision to hike prices, said Alan Hargrave, director of Housing and Residence Life.
He said Parking Services doesn’t get help from state funding and has to generate its own budget over time. That budget is responsible for maintenance or replacement of shuttle buses, parking staff and maintenance of parking structures around campus like the McKinley Avenue parking garage, the L.A. Pittenger Student Center parking garage and the John R. Emens Auditorium parking garage.
“The last I heard, on a surface lot, each spot is $5,000 to build. So if there are 400 parking spaces in that, multiply it times $5,000,” Hargrave said. “That’s what it costs to build them. Every now and then, they have to be resurfaced, restriped, resealed and things of that nature.”
There hasn’t necessarily been a giant expansion of parking over the past couple of years except for the housing parking behind Kinghorn Hall and a few small commuter lots near the Village, Wray said. However, Hargrave said it’s not the number of parking spots that raise permit prices, but the increase in cost of services and maintenance.
“The cost of maintaining those lots will go up and over the time that we have to resurface a lot after, let’s say, 20 years, the amount of money is going to go up and when you look at how much a general permit [is], if it’s $5,000 a spot for a surface lot, how many years does somebody have to pay the cost of a permit to pay for that space?” he said. “In the mean time, the shuttle buses, all of that has to be maintained, they have to be replaced every so often.”
Hargrave also said Parking Services has an account that retains a percentage of its revenue annually to maintain the cost of eventual renewal, but also to pay on debts still owed from the building of the McKinley Avenue parking garage.
“We call them bonds, for people like us — it’s our mortgage on our building,” he said. “So there is a certain amount that has to be paid to a debt service every year.”
Most students understand that prices of just about anything have gone up over the years, so there hasn’t been a lot of discussion about the prices of permits. However, some students feel that if they pay for a permit, they should have a spot to park in.
Sophomore Courtlynd Scott said there have been times where commuter parking seemed virtually unavailable.
“One day, I was only 10 minutes later than when I usually get here and I usually park over at the commuter lot,” Scott said. “I was at the Student Center one for 20 minutes; [I] couldn’t find a parking spot. I went to all three areas back here and ended up having to park in the road for an hour, go to class, run back from class [and] find another parking spot — it’s just kind of chaotic.”
Scott said she thinks commuter permit prices are understandable but pricey and thinks there should be more commuter spots closer to the center of campus.
“If you want a parking garage spot then you have to pay way more than $90 and it’s still at the end for buses to get you,” she said.
There are approximately 1,883 commuter parking spots on the north and south side of campus near Worthen Arena and the Student Center, and Wray said every single spot gets sold every year.
Although parking lots can look packed to capacity, Parking Services is constantly monitoring and looking for ways to improve the situation.
“We try to go through and monitor what our usage is like,” she said. “That should not ever happen in a red lot because of that percentage that we figure, it’s figured a little high so that at peak times, even when it’s full, it’s not so full that nobody finds a place.”
The stadium parking spots are also available to commuters, as well as restricted parking and general faculty and staff parking.
Some spots throughout the semester do become available if something happens and the owner of the permit no longer needs to park on campus.
“We almost always, every semester, will have some,” Wray said. “We know what our capacity is per lot and for whatever reason, whether it’s termination, drop out, whatever, we have spaces available we usually sell.”
Scott said it can be frustrating for her to find a spot on some days.
“That does kind of anger me because I pay $90 dollars, I expect a spot for my car,” Scott said. “I understand that some people don’t follow the rules; some don’t park where they’re supposed to [park and it] causes an overflow, but if I pay $90, I should have somewhere where I’m able to park.”
But Wray said problems with commuter parking availability have never been the case.
“I don’t ever remember not having any commuter spaces at all at least on one end of campus or the other,” she said.
