Parking!
 

• Where do you park?
• How far away is it?
• How much do you pay for parking?
• Is parking an issue at your school?

I dunno about you guys, but at Mizzou, I'm finding that parking is a HUGE issue. That is... if you don't plan on living in the dorms...

If you're living in the dorms, you can get assigned a spot in a parking garage fairly close to your dorm (usually) for a fairly decent price...

If you're not living in a dorm, and are living in greek housing, you're pretty much screwed. There is parking along the streets of greek town, but they're ALWAYS taken.. Try parking in someones lot? Nope. You'll get booted quicker than you can lock your car doors...

The problem is especially bad if you're a girl living in a sorority with 150+ girls and 30 parking spaces... Most couldn't buy a spot at the house lot even if they wanted to... So many are forced to park at farrot field (about a 25min walk)..
Imagine having to walk 25mins everytime you had to use your car? Wow.

Their OTHER option is to purchase parking from a fraternity with extra spots... I've heard of many on campus charging from $400 (cheapest) to $900 (most expensive) per SEMESTER.. JUST for parking. How ridiculous is that?

I'll most likely get to park in the lot, with the large but worthwhile fee of $200 per semester.. It is $400 for anyone else wanting to purchase a spot. :eek:

Is parking this crazy for you all as well?

-Matt

Where do you park? usually in the CSUS parking garage 1

How far away is it? not that far, but there are several other parking lots that are farther (depends on what buildings your classes are in)

How much do you pay for parking? I think my permit was 120 dollars. They raised it up from 80 recently cuz they are building a third garage.

Is parking an issue at your school? yes, it is a "commuter" university so everyone has cars and just too many students and cars and not enough space. Its not that bad for me since I take night classes. but mornings no way.....I avoid morning classes if i can cuz parking is HELL........

Re: Parking!
 

If Mizzou has reserved spots in a garage for a fairly decent price, than its the exception to the rule.


The rule of thumb at almost all universities is that if its a spot in a garage, its gonna be expensive. If you want a spot thats not expensive, its either on a street or so far away from where you need to be its almost on another campus.

Re: Parking!
 

Parking was and continues to be a HUGE issue at UGA. My last semester, I was paying $30 per month (I was commuting from off campus) to park in an on campus deck. And, I still had to take a campus bus to get anywhere - as everyone does. $30 got me on campus, then I had to find my own way to class. It would have taken me at least 15 good minutes to walk to my primary building from my parking spot. Unfortunately, when I was there, the sidewalks were being worked on, so I really couldn't walk if I wanted to!!

Where do you park? I park in a parking deck on campus.

How far away is it? It's about 10-12 minutes walk from my dorm and any of my classes. It's on the outskirts of the campus.

How much do you pay for parking? I pay $370 for the parking deck pass.

Is parking an issue at your school? Yes and no. We have three decks on campus, and they are adding on to the deck in which I park. I can always park in the other decks if I want for $5.00 a day (which is generally considered cheap). And 10 minutes, while it is inconvenient, is not killer. Our school does provide an escort van at night during the week so that you don't have to walk back in the dark, which is nice. BUT...

If I want to park close to my dorm or close to my class, it's a mess. The majority of spots around my dorm are 30 min. meters- and they make LOTS of money off of the parking tickets they give us! The other spaces around the dorm are coded so that faculty, commuters, and night students can park there. HOW does this make any sense? The dorm I live in is not by any sort of campus building other than the cafeteria. When was the last time faculty, commuters, and night students spent any sort of time in the dorm or in the cafeteria? It is useful for our sisters who are commuters, but they aren't a huge number of girls. There are similar problems all over campus. Residential students get screwed in the deal. I used to commute, and never had a problem finding parking.

I drove one of these (still do) in college:

http://www.hondacars.com/images/2004...om147_img2.jpg

The inside was large enough for me to fold one of my seats against the wall and bungee my bike to it. Parking was not a problem, I parked in the BFE parking lot. I then got my bike out and rode to class. Was actually faster than trying to find decent parking and then walking.

Wow! I thought parking at my school was bad. We think parking is bad here but compared to yours it's not. Most of the on campus student parking is around the dorms. Usually you can find a parking spot there and you will just have to walk to your dorm. Only like a 5 min walk. There are some commuter parkiing spots on campus but you have to be "special" to park there. Most of the commuters park accross the main road in a big parking lot and ride the bus to campus. The bus makes like 4 stops through out campus. I don't remember exactly what we pay for our parking permit but it isn't anywhere close to the amounts you al pay. I would say under 100.00 for sure. I guess I am lucky to go to a pretty small school.

Parking has to be the biggest headache and is a hassle on every college campus I've ever been associated with. As an undergrad, we called them "hunting permits"! I attended a primarily commuter campus (less than 10% of students lived on campus) so there was no difference between residential/ non-residential permits. As I commuter, that sucked because the dorm students would move their cars after classes were over and when commuters tried to make their 8 am classes there was nothing left! (for those who think it doesn't make sense to allow commuters to be close to your dorm, have you ever looked at where else they can park? Maybe your lot isn't close to too many classroom buildings, but are there enough lots that are? You're already on campus to get to your classes, commuters aren't. The university doesn't care about making it convenient for residential students to be able to go off campus for anything) But-- at least that university had the enlightened attitude that students do drive. When I was in grad school at U Michigan, there was no such thing as a student parking permit. If you lived outside Ann Arbor (which I did), you could get a commuter permit which allowed you to park in commuter lots (over at the basketball arena/ football stadium) and take a bus to campus. That or you fed meters. Most of us fed meters (the professors made sure there was a break after 2 hours, otherwise we'd all walk out to feed our meters). The parking rules were enforced by the city, not the campus which made appealing tickets impossible.

I know several chapters that treat parking permits for the house separately from room pick- they are like gold!.

At my first university parking was a HASSLE - I parked in the lot by my dorm, which had something like 700 spots for 3 dorms - nope, not enough, because all the other dorm parking lots were tiny. I paid something like $130 a year for parking there, though, so I can't complain.

When I moved into my sorority house parking was FREEEE which was fabulous, you just had to be a Gamma Phi to park there. I also liked it because I got to keep my on campus permit (I movedi in at semester) so I could drive down to the dorms. Nobody wants to walk a mile and a half across campus in snow!

At my current university, parking is outrageously expensive but I've not once had trouble finding a spot. I pay $700ish a year for garaged parking at a garage that's a block from my apartment and two blocks from the student union - it doesn't get too much better than that. They appear to have mastered supply and demand. :D

Well, parking is a nightmare at CSULB. It's downright impossible to find parking the first few weeks of class. After that, it thins out. However, you still have to hike up the hill rain or shine so that can be a pain in the ass. All the parking lots are in the worst locations b/c they are by the dorms but nowhere near the buildings that hold the classes so off-campus residents still have to park near the darn dorms & hike up the hill.

Parkins is only about $68 dollars a semester so it's not as bad as other places but when you're on a tight budget, every penny counts!

I'm happy to hear that parking isn't a problem at some of your schools, but I've never been on a campus where parking wasn't one of the biggest complaints students have.

I probably paid more in parking tickets than I did tuition when I was in college.

Parking was murder at my alma mater. Students, undergrads in particular, were highly discouraged from having cars. And in Boston/Cambridge, you don't really need a car anyway.

Each of the two student family housing buildings has its own parking. The one I lived in actually had a garage.

All other students living on campus shared one parking lot that was wayyyy off at the far end of west campus. This was especially bad if you happened to live on east campus. Most east-campus residents parked along Memorial Drive; unfortunately that is a snow emergency route, strictly enforced, so whenever it snowed everyone had to move their cars into the lot.

Half the spots were for grad students, the other half for undergrads. Each undergrad dorm was allocated a handful of spots, which were given out by lottery. Grad students could pretty much have a spot for the asking. There were always fewer grad students with cars than spots, but the extra spots were not reallocated to undergrads. :rolleyes:

There are separate commuter lots for those living off-campus, including off-campus fraternity and sorority houses. These are pretty convenient to campus (more so than the resident parking!).

Edit: Forgot to answer how much parking costs. It used to be $10/semester, then it suddenly got jacked up to $300/year. :eek: That's for residents; I'm not sure what commuters paid. Parking tickets usually ran around $10, but if you didn't pay, you couldn't register or receive your diploma.

One year, the parking office forgot to put the little R on the residential parking stickers (commuter student stickers were identical, but no R). An overzealous campus cop ran around the residential parking lot one afternoon, ticketing every car in the lot for not having a resident parking sticker. Did I mention the lot was keycard controlled, so you couldn't even get your car in the lot if you weren't entitled to park there?? :rolleyes: A couple of people I know fought the ticket and won, but a lot of people just paid. $10/ticket x 150 cars = a lot of donuts :rolleyes:

Try parking in Manhattan or many places in NYC. It's so hard to find a spot on the street. The least expensive parking that my bf found was $350 per month in Manhattan so he parks in Queens for about half the price. No wonder I don't have a car.

When I was in college, the parking stickers were about $20 per year. You didn't get a reserved spot though. Parking became such a huge issue that they raised the price to about $200 per year. Eventually, freshmen living on campus were not allowed to have cars. I didn't have a car back then either.

Parking
 

Like most of you, parking is a huge hassle at my school, so I was really excited to move into the new campus apartments that had its own parking lot that you had to swipe a card to get into. I assumed that this meant that I'd always have a space in the lot right behind where I lived - but actually it meant that the university was out to make money, and oversold the set number of spots, so we'd be forced to park illegally since there was no where else to go, and if we weren't up by 8am to move our cars..they got towed. :rolleyes:

Ditto.

When I lived at the house it wasn't an issue, parking was free in our lot.

This past year I parked at meters alot because I had a spot at a local church ($20/year permit)...but that was on one side of the campus and my classes were on the other.

I will never make the mistake of buying a parking pass through the school again...too expensive and you can never find a spot anyway...

Parking at my University is free due to the fact it is a commutter school but we do have some meter parking which is for only 40 min. The only time parking is really a hassle is during the first two weeks of the new semesters in fall and winter. Also, parking is a bitch in the winter because once it snows, you can't find the lines and people park all screwy, sometimes even blocking people in. Otherwise, parking isn't a hassle.

Where do you park? I park in the University parking lots.

How far away is it? Thankfully at Rio it's basically a commuter school, so plenty of parking. I normally have to walk about 3-5 minutes for my longer treks.

How much do you pay for parking? $50 for an entire school year. You get your pass from the campus police and it is charged on your school account.

Is parking an issue at your school? Only for the Educational Department, it sucks. They only have around 10 open spots in front of the building, otherwise you have to walk across one of the main roads after you get a spot.

At NAU I live in family housing on campus so I park right next to my apartment and usually thats were my car stays. I walk to class oor I leave my apartment about a 1/2hr before my class is supposed to start so I can ride the bus to class. The wait for the bust is usually a 20min. wait for a 5minute ride.

Parking permits fees are usually based on what type of permit you are going to get . I pay $56 a semester for a Residence hall parking sticker, and I am only allowed to park in my designated area, so if I want to drive to the student union and get some food I have to put money into a parking meter so I won't get a ticket for parking in a non-designated area. Ticket fees for that offense are between $10-50 dollars.

The university houses about 7000 students and every year parking services oversell permits by about a couple of hundred. THe parking lots are not large and there are no parking garages on campus. Ifsomeone finds a space close to their dorm the car usually doesn't leave that space, because if it does bam there goes the space. When you come back the space is taken and it will take another 15mins to find another one. I've seen people cruise the parking lot waiting for someone to leave just so they can get a space.

If I wanted to park in all the commuter lots or all residence hall lots I would have to spend about $500 dollars per yr (I believe that's right) to have that "PRIVILEGE" , which is not one that I want to pay to have.

There are employee lots where students can park in if they have a night class. Parking in those lots doesn't start until 5pm and if the parking nazi's are doing rounds and find a student parking in that spot and the parking nazi's watch's reads 4:59 you will be ticketed.

It get's worse when the university has events like the career fair because then whole parking lots will be closed and people that park in those lots will park in the commuter lots or in metered parking lots using spaces that need to be used for commuter students.

It's a big mess and it doesn't seem like the problem will be solved anytime soon.

*Sorry about the use of the word nazi, it's just the way that we describe parking personnel here at NAU, because it alway's seems like they are just looking to give someone a ticket for the smallest thing. If I offend....I'm sorry in advance.

Nice.

Sounds pretty familiar though. I was glad that I could park at the fraternity house and ride my bike in to class.

AAAAAAAh, an other reason to go to smaller Colleges in smaller towns!:)

Use to not have Meters on campus, but alas, that has been history for a long time now, the almighty $$!

Most of the Greek houses except the Tri-Sigma and ADG are across from Campus!:cool:

parking on my campus was a pretty big problem.

freshmen and sophomores that live on campus were supposed to keep there cars down in this holding lot during the week and then could bring it on all weekend and after a certain time during the week. freshmen year i usually kept mine at my cousins house off campus or in the lot and sophomore year i usually kept it at my friends fraternity house. although by keeping it at his house, he felt it gave him free reign to use it and i usually saw it all over the place! when i moved into an apartment junior and senior year there were tons of spaces in our complex. but finding a spot to park on campus or uptown was not the easiest. the put a parking garage uptown before my senior year so that made things a bit easier.

Parking was always a problem at Boston U., particularly when the school started putting up more buildings and taking away parking lots. There's only so much room to expand in Boston.

Senior year, parking wasn't guaranteed. YOu could pay for a spot, that didn't mean you'd get one. Not many students drove, but still it was a hassle for those that did.

Where do you park? in front of my townhouse.....we're not allowed to have sorority housing where i live and the school prides itself on having 85% of it's students living off campus so we don't have floors of dorms either. but i live outside the mile radius (which determines if you can get a sticker) so i can drive to campus

How far away is it? what my parking spot on campus? i can park where ever i feel like with my pretty blue sticker :)

How much do you pay for parking? $172

Is parking an issue at your school? yes very much so. since so many students commute, it's obviously a problem but the real problem is that the school is busting at the seams and they don't seem to understand the need for a parking deck. the campus still owns a lot of property which is still woods but they rather focus on more important needs.....like the 2 murders that happened within 1 month due to negligence of the admissions people (2 words, background check)

but then again, i go to school in a city right on the beach so Wilmington in general has parking/traffic problems

When I was an undergrad, where I parked depending on what year I was in the house. Our spots in the lot (like 20) are given out based on a point system. You earn points from holding different offices, GPA, campus stuff, etc. Once those spots are filled we generally had about two options available - park on the street and have to move your car daily or get a ticket. They used to be $5, now they're like $15. Or you could rent a spot in a gravel lot near our house from a local slumlord. When I rented from him it only cost $70/semester. Now he apparently requires that you rent for an entire year and it costs somewhere between $250-$300.
And like a lot of schools, parking can be an issue, that's why the ticketers where called "Parking Nazis."

Parking at IU is a big problem. You basically can't park anywhere on campus from 7am-5pm unless you are a grad student or faculty member. All the Greek houses have parking lots but I have no idea how many spots each one has. The Third Street houses, DG, Theta, and Sigma Chi are all in excellent locations, super close to the main campus. The ones on North Jordan (except DG) and the Extension are pretty far away, but there is a bus line (B) that serves that area.

The dorms do have parking lots. Back when I started at IU, freshmen could not park at their dorm unless they had a letter stating they had an off-campus job or some reason they needed their car. Now anyone who lives in the dorms can apply for a D sticker, which allows them to park in the parking lot of their dorm. Almost everyone else gets an E sticker, which allows you to park at the stadium and take the campus shuttle over. After 5pm and on weekends, you can park anywhere on campus as long as you have a sticker. (D or E) I parked at my apartment complex...parking was free there and it was right across the street from the campus shuttle bus stop. I still got a sticker, though, for when I drove to the library or wherever on campus in the evenings. (there were parking officers patrolling the lot of the library and places like that and they ticketed everyone without a valid sticker.)

I used to park at one of the garages on campus (University of Arizona). It was on the south end and none of my classes were there so it was like a 15 minute walk to class. But it was the largest garage on campus (literally thousands of spots) and so it was always easy to find a spot. I paid $450 for the year. Now a parking pass for Zone 1 lots on campus are like $180 and especially on the first day of school you can literally drive around for an hour before you find a spot. I think that the money was worth the garage pass because I always found a spot right away and I never had to return to a car that felt like the inside of an oven...from the intense AZ sun.

Re: Parking!
 

In Boston, you pray for a parking space. And then you drive around and pray some more.

Most students don't bring cars simply because it's not worth the hassle. By the time you find a parking space, you could have walked or taken public transportation to the place you were intending to go.

Prices are expensive. Overnight parking stickers are $1,000 per year on campus lots. But that's a bargain compared to the city-at-large. Boston parking spots get SOLD individually for over $100,000! Often included at that price with a condo or house.

~ Mel

Ah, a fellow BU grad. :)

And yeah, this sums it up, along with what I just posted.

it's amazing to see that my school isn't the only one with parking problems. funny thing is, most of the schools yall are mentioning are pretty big schools (population size) while our's barely reaches 10,000 :eek:

Graduated from the University of Akron in 2003. Population 25,000, almost all are commuters but like 3,000 who live on campus

# Where do you park? When I was in college Id park as close as I could to the building I had all my classes in. The first two years I left my car at the dorm and walked to all of them, then I started to drive to the building all my classes were in

# How far away is it? that lot, if you can get in it (only has like 20 spots) it is next to the building, if not I have to go to the parking deck and try to find one, but I hate the deck, lots of wrecks there and people hit cars all the time and leave the scene.

# How much do you pay for parking? lord parking started out as i think it was 40 a semester when I came to college in 98, by 2003 when I graduated it was like 85 i think a semester and good parkign was hard to come by, it was so outrageous to pay for a pass, Id not get one, park in the spot and risk getting a $5 ticket. In my last semester, I got 3 tickets so I spent 15 to park where everyone else parked and they paid the stupid 85 for the pass.

# Is parking an issue at your school? HELL YEAH!!!! They are building decks all over, but they buidl them in places that are so far from campus or from buildings and then you have to walk all over the stinking place just to park. It takes like 30 mins some days to find a spot and people drive around and around looking for good ones, noone wants to park in the deck far from campus.

LOL but I've been to visit UNCW... and y'alls parking problems are no joke! I don't see how you guys walk across your campus- it's so spread out. I would seriously die trying to get from class to class on foot.

I think it's a universal truth that students will constantly whine about parking woes. During my stint in student government, this is the #1 issue raised by new members of student government (they thought they could do something about it). We passed useless resolution after useless resolution favoring the construction of a parking garage through increased parking fines, increased parking sticker prices, etc. The fact was that the faculty and admin really didn't care.

Of course, they had reserved parking.

As I said earlier in this thread, it was never really an issue to me. The campus was physically small enough where you could get from a class on one end of campus to another on the other end in the 10 minutes passing time they allow on MWF. I figure that if you can get to your car in that same period of time then there really isn't a problem.

hehehe I know what you mean! my first university had a student population of a little over 6,000... most were commuters, but a bunch of them either lived on campus or in the apt. complexes surrounding the school, and even though they had a ton of parking spaces, students still cried about it because the parking spaces weren't right next to their buildings :p

Another BU grad on the site...that's three of us, as far as I know.

Where do you park?: When I went to CSUS, I usually parked in the main parking structure or by the Art and Sculpture Lab.

How far away is it?: The garage was in the middle of campus and close to my major's building. The ASL is a hike and a half in the rain I will tell you that! But it wasn't that far. My last year there I walked to campus most of the time cuz I lived by the levee that surrounds campus. It was a 10 minute walk or so.

How much do you pay for parking?: Used to pay $80 a semester. But it was raised recently. And after building a second structure, it's still not enough to support the students. Now when I do go there, I get daily passes at $2.75... or I risk it... or use an old ticket envelope and put it on my windshield (YES I am that girl!)

Is parking an issue at your school?: Ya... very much so. The spaces in the garages have been rumored to be smaller than regulation size to fit more cars in. However, people with giant 4x4s don't realize they can't park in compact spots so it makes it very difficult for us lil Corolla owners to find a spot that we can get out of safely. [/rant]

yeah imagine trying to hike across campus in August when it's over 100 degrees out and 100% humidity......it's disgusting but other than that the campus really isn't spread out that far. Most of the classrooms are on one side of campus, i feel bad for the freshmen though because the dorms are FAR from the academic side

You want to talk about parking problems...ahhhhem...welcome to NC State University. It's the largest campus of any college in NC and home to 33,000+ students (undergrad, grad, and life long learning). Our main campus is 2, 110 acres and we have 2 additional campuses - Centennial Campus (which is about 1 mile from main campus) and the Vet School (which is about 2 miles from main campus). And let's talk about parking...when you buy a parking permit...it's really a HUNTING permit. It allows you to HUNT for a parking space. They oversell them every year and you will hardly ever spend less than 30-45 minutes looking for a parking space in your designated area. The largest parking lot is located on one edge of campus (though they are currently building new dorms past the parking lot...so it won't be the edge of campus any longer) and most classroom buildings are a 10-25 minute walk away....depending upon where on campus you want to go.

Other parking decks and stuff are avaliable closer (anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes away from class) - but you have to be a senior or grad student to get permits for these locations.

Freshman can not park on campus.

I have always parked right off campus at the Theta Chi house (yay for having Theta Chi friends) for free. It's a 10 minute walk to my classes (in the humanities buildings)...but if I'm heading to the gym or anything, it's about a 20-25 minute walk depending upon what gear I'm carrying...

You can sometimes snag a spot in the two pay lot's on campus (at $1/hr maxing at $6).

Parking permits varry in cost, the cheapest being $160/semester and the good ones at $365 or so a semester.

Yay NCSU! Go Pack!

[ETA] Oh, we also have 4 Park & Ride Lots...but you have to pay to Park & Ride...$160 a semester. Yes, that's right $160 a semester to leave your car in a parking lot way off campus so you can ride a bus to campus (one way to campus is approximately 45 mintues). Go Pack!

It just went up again to $120/semester!!! :eek: I'm so thankful for DG and having our own private parking lot!