Frustrated students avoid high price of parking on campus
Matt Watson
Issue date: 10/13/08 Section: News
Parking on the sacred front lawn of Old Main just might save students a few dollars when it's all said and done. The fine for parking on grass is only $30, less than the ticket students pay for parking in a faculty lot during the middle of the day or for leaving their cars on the curb outside a dormitory for a few minutes to run inside.
The UA Transit and Parking Department gives out 50,000 citations every year, according to its Web site, and that, combined with the high price of parking permits, causes students to look for cheaper parking alternatives.
Transit and Parking is a multimillion-dollar industry on the Fayetteville campus, drawing the ire of UA students frustrated with limited parking on campus, the irregularity of some parking policies and the high price of parking permits and fines for violations.
Discontented students are getting creative in the ways they try to get around the inconveniences of campus parking, while TPD officials say the students' enmity is misdirected and creates more problems for themselves.
Trading spaces
There are roughly 11,200 parking spots on campus and about 19,000 students coming and going each day. In specific areas, parking has become a major issue. Cars circling parking lots like vultures is a common sight, so it's obvious there are often a lot of cars and not a lot of spaces to work with.
While it is rumored that TPD sells twice as many permits as it has spaces, that's not quite true.
Andy Gilbride, parking program director, said TPD usually oversells resident reserved permits by about 5 percent. A priority list for Zone 1 (Maple Hill, the Northwest Quad and Reid) on the TPD Web site has 441 names highlighted for 322 spots, a 37 percent increase.
But Gilbride later said that TPD only sold exactly 322 passes in Zone 1, and that some of the students who were offered resident reserved turned it down.
Pay-as-you-go parking
The bottom line is the biggest problems for students. With the always-rising prices of books, tuition and housing, students are hard-pressed to shell out $400 to $600 for the most convenient parking spots on campus. Add to that the hefty fees TPD hands out for parking in the wrong place, and it's easy to see why "transit" and "parking" aren't popular words on campus.
The UA Transit and Parking Department gives out 50,000 citations every year, according to its Web site, and that, combined with the high price of parking permits, causes students to look for cheaper parking alternatives.
Transit and Parking is a multimillion-dollar industry on the Fayetteville campus, drawing the ire of UA students frustrated with limited parking on campus, the irregularity of some parking policies and the high price of parking permits and fines for violations.
Discontented students are getting creative in the ways they try to get around the inconveniences of campus parking, while TPD officials say the students' enmity is misdirected and creates more problems for themselves.
Trading spaces
There are roughly 11,200 parking spots on campus and about 19,000 students coming and going each day. In specific areas, parking has become a major issue. Cars circling parking lots like vultures is a common sight, so it's obvious there are often a lot of cars and not a lot of spaces to work with.
While it is rumored that TPD sells twice as many permits as it has spaces, that's not quite true.
Andy Gilbride, parking program director, said TPD usually oversells resident reserved permits by about 5 percent. A priority list for Zone 1 (Maple Hill, the Northwest Quad and Reid) on the TPD Web site has 441 names highlighted for 322 spots, a 37 percent increase.
But Gilbride later said that TPD only sold exactly 322 passes in Zone 1, and that some of the students who were offered resident reserved turned it down.
Pay-as-you-go parking
The bottom line is the biggest problems for students. With the always-rising prices of books, tuition and housing, students are hard-pressed to shell out $400 to $600 for the most convenient parking spots on campus. Add to that the hefty fees TPD hands out for parking in the wrong place, and it's easy to see why "transit" and "parking" aren't popular words on campus.
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