Everyday college students leave their homes to embark on a journey that will take them further in life. That journey may have a few twists and turns, and even some pit stops in the process. But what they do not realize is that the journey may come at a cost, and those pit stops, well, they require a parking fee.
Recently, with the increase of enrollment and new construction projects parking has become a major network for business in itself around college campuses. The last place you would think to charge for parking is a prestigious university where students are struggling to make it into the workforce, but they do. And for some universities the Parking Departments are raking in the bucks.
Currently the average cost for a student parking permit at University of Nevada Las Vegas is about $45 a semester or $105 annually. The average ticket fine for parking violators is $15, and if those are not paid by a given date they will automatically double. $15 may not seem like much but when the tuition is increasing along with the cost of fuel just to make it to school it adds up.
University of Nevada Reno has parking prices that are almost triple from what the standard at UNLV is. Parking Administrator for UNR, Kim Atkins, 23, says that the average cost of a student parking permit there is $188 per semester and $375 annually. While ticket citations are at an average of $20. Atkins said that the reason why it is so much is because they do not have much parking available anyway.
“By pricing it at such a high cost the people that dearly need to park on campus will actually spend that much,” Atkins said.
But UNR only has 1000 less parking stalls than UNLV, and UNLV still only charges a third of what UNR does. According to Tad McDowell, UNLV Parking Director, UNLV has approximately 10,000 parking spaces for the 20,000 permits that they issue each year. While UNR has about 9,050 parking spaces for the 9,600 permits they issued last year. This means that UNLV issues about 10,000 more permits than UNR does and still has the cheapest set price.
Atkins also said that due to the construction of two new buildings the university has been forced to close a number of parking lots. Plans for major construction sites have impacted the parking greatly here at UNLV as well, but that doesn’t mean they must increase the prices.
According to UNLV’s Parking and Transportation Services Website, http://parking.unlv.edu/, some lots need to be expendable to meet the needs of the university. Some of the recent projects include: Student Recreation Center, Moyer Student Union, and the Science, Engineering, and Technology buildings.
UNLV and UNR are not the only places where this is occurring. Stanford University also faces parking issues of their own. Director of Parking Services at Stanford, Brodie Hamilton, 58, said that when they lose surface parking to construction sites they must push drivers farther and farther out.
“It’s something that just has to be done if we are going to build on to the university,” Hamilton said, “Parking is something that is near and dear to everybody because it impacts so many people. We always try to meet student’s demands, while providing needs for the university.”
Currently the standard pricing for parking permits at Stanford is $24 per month and $234 annually. According to Hamilton, Stanford has approximately 22,000 parking stalls for the 19,000 permits they issued this past year. This means that Stanford sells, on average, 3,000 less permits than there are available spaces. And according to Hamilton, there are still about 1,000 to 1,500 spaces left empty each day. So, construction might be putting a damper in a few students day to find parking, but they still seem to have plenty available.
“A big issue that we face is trying to accomodate student’s needs for parking, while attending to the number of events that we host here at Stanford,” Hamilton said, “It is a challenge.”
Hamilton also said that he wants to try to process parking structures around the roads of the university so the center of campus will not be so congested.
UNLV is also working on plans for a new parking garage that should initiate this fall. But many students believe that after already paying for tuition and the number of fees that come along, parking should just be free due to all the parking the university is taking away.
Psychology major at UNLV, Andre Groom, 23, believes that it would just be easier for the university to give free parking to students because with every parking lot they take away the university is not building anymore parking structures to make up for the loss. Groom also says that the parking authorities are getting stricter on giving citations and monitoring cars with the knowledge that there is less and and less parking each year.
Groom had his vehicle booted recently within 5 minutes after his meter ran out. He said that he put enough quarters in the meter to last him through class except for a remaining 5 minutes that it would take him to walk back to his car. Parking enforcement busted him within that remainder of time.
“It’s so ludacris when somebody will just run in real quick and enforcement will just almost tailgate them to check the meter. And they did it right when I got out of class, at least wait until the middle of class when somebody is going to stay there. If its the end of a class somebody will move. They just had no regard and did it right at the end of my class, which to me, makes no sense. I can understand if it was thirty minutes later, but it was right in the transition period. To me this seems like greed on somebody’s part,” Groom said, “If anything they should include the parking within the tuition.”
“The parking situation, due to the new construction buildings, has basically been limited and is kind of frustrating because before the new student union there was alot more student parking. So basically the reduction of parking makes it more difficult to find and there is more frustration and road rage in a parking lot,” Pees said, “If we were all living in residence halls I could understand the limitation, but since we’re mostly a commuter campus it’s a problem, plus the Thomas & Mack hold events on school days where students are parking and we have to fight over parking even more for extracurricular events than what the university is really intended for.”
However, an anonymous parking official said that paying for parking seperate from tuition is only necessary.
“It would be much harder to monitor the parking lots if we just gave away free parking. Anybody who is anybody would just come and park on campus. Students have to remember that we issue permits separately for the safety of the students. We don’t want some Joe Schmo coming to park on our campus. Plus not every permit we issue is intended for someone that is paying for tuiton. We sell visitor permits too.” –Anonymous Parking Official
Due to a number of Rebel Yell articles regarding the parking situation, Parking Officials at UNLV are not allowed to answer any questions. Leaving the previous quote anonymous was requested.
Finding parking on the UNLV campus might be somewhat of a daily struggle, and for surrounding universities as well. It’s not enough that there are not even enough available spaces for the number of permits issued, but now students are dealing with stricter parking authorities and increased pricing of permits due to construction. But according to the many parking directors quoted above they are trying to do their best to keep up with the loss. On the other side of the scale parking authorities are not keeping up, and this is something students believe officials should focus more on, rather than giving parking violators citations.
So until that journey that students embark on comes to a stop, getting there can come at a pricey cost.
0 responses so far ↓
There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.