Photo Illustraion by John Henningsen/The Bulletin

Green parking permits are now available to off campus students.

The permits – which go for $70 each – have traditionally been reserved for residents of student housing. But this year’s 4.6 percent enrollment drop created an unexpected parking surplus in some green permit zones, according to Capt. Chris Hoover, director of police and safety.

It has also created congestion around the Towers complex, where most residents are incoming freshman.

“The freshman parking lot is always full,” said Mason Teeter, a freshman majoring in business administration. “It makes me not want to leave so I don’t lose my spot. And when I do leave, I have to drive around for 15 minutes just to find another one.”

The green permits are being offered to off campus students in order to relieve parking congestion in other areas, Hoover said, and to gain revenue. A few green permits had already been sold and there are also plans to add meters to the Morse parking lot.
“If I am late to class in the morning, then I use the meters,” said Carlos Urgiles, sophomore biochemistry and molecular biology major. “If I am not late or am going to take more than a couple hours, I just find free parking on the streets somewhere. I am already wasting money on gas so I have to balance the expense someway.”
Hoover said he would like to see an increase in revenue from the new meters because revenue has decreased due to the decline in enrollment.

Police and Safety records for 2009 show incomes of about $100,000 from all permits, $87,000 from meters and $74,500 from tickets and other violations. This money goes to maintain parking lots and meters, Hoover said, and to pay salaries of police and safety employees and updating equipment.

“The meters are more fair in my mind,” Hoover said. “Anybody can use them. All you have to do is have a quarter and it still generates some revenue.”

Because of the cost, Hoover said the department will relocate old and repaired meters for the lot. A few students have complained about malfunctioning meters, a problem Hoover said is bound to happen due to old meters and the number of meters, which makes it hard to maintain them all.

Hoover said that members of police and safety do not actually test the meters regularly because they are tested every day by the people who use them. If a meter is not reading the correct time, Hoover said he or another officer check the meters but most of the malfunctions are dead batteries or jams.

“We need to be notified that it is malfunctioning,” said Hoover. “We do try to keep them in functioning order and as with any device things malfunction. It is a machine and machines are not going to be working correctly all the time.”

Rocky Robinson

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McCall

Somewhere between the constant flickering of yours eyes from left to right and the muttering of obscene things, you realize that the thirty minutes you set aside to find parking before class is not so slowly evaporating in this dry Kansas heat. By this point there is no doubt that a mild panic has begun to set in.

Parking on campus can be a traumatic event. Yes campus provides an allotted space for off-campus students—if a permit is bought—but those spaces tend to fill up quite quickly. In this type of situation only two solutions come to mind: arrive early or walk.

I confess that mornings are not my favorite, so that automatically rules out arriving early to hunt for a parking place, leaving only the option of walking to class left available to me. Walking has more benefits than just lowering your stress levels when it comes to parking.

It single handedly puts money back into my pocket. Finding ways to save on gas has become a hobby of sorts for me.  The way I see it, the less I need to spend on gas the more mobility I truly have. I can go see that new movie being released, or just be able to go out with some friends on the weekend.

The walk itself isn’t even that bad. It give me the necessary time needed to completely wake up, listen to my music and prep myself for the oncoming day. To even think of starting my day without my music and coffee is a terrifying thought.  Almost sounds like the start to a bad horror film.

After psyching myself up for the day with three of my favorite songs, the walk is over. By the end of my adventure—which is sure to become routine—I am wide awake and ready to begin another day.

It is interesting how physical activity that early in the morning can be so energizing throughout the rest of the day. Seems to me that it is true what people say about being active. Go figure.

At least one good thing came out of the start of this semester: I no longer need to worry about having a parking permit for campus.

Amanda McCall

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Illustration by Juhye Bak.

Parking is never an easy task no matter where you go. Limited spaces parking meters and fines just come with the territory. But it seems that the parking situation on campus has gotten worse since last year. Finding a place to park is more difficult and meters have become more expensive. And the free parking spots have seemed to all but disappear.

Grey parking is still available near the student recreation center, but it’s isolated from the rest of campus to an extent that it becomes impractical. And now the prices of meters have gone up in price since last year. Meters on campus now cost more than the ones off campus throughout the city. What caused the changes? The school raises fees and fines simply because it can. Because for the most part those who drive have to drive.

In an economic sense, the school has a monopoly on the parking situation. Students will continue to pay whatever they have to in order to park on campus because they have no other option. It might be because of this that the school has raised prices. The university has been working hard the last two years to pinch as many pennies as possible to prepare for the massive renovations soon to start in the union.

It would be easy to assume that the school is using the parking situation on campus as a venue to produce more money.

Parking is something the school should provide as a service to the students and faculty. Their main goal should not be to use it as a profit-making opportunity. Of course the school needs to cover expenses and be able to afford to sustain the parking lots and pay the meter readers and whatnot. But when the school becomes more interested in profit than helping meet the needs of the students that is a problem.

Perhaps the school can work to renovate the parking situation on campus. Use some of the school grounds that are underutilized, such as the grassy area across from Beach music hall, to construct a parking garage. This would be an efficient way to create more parking options without taking up a lot of room. And some revisions should be made to the parking permits system.

It seems that the school oversells the amount of spaces for permits so that there would not be enough spaces if needed. This is why it feels like students are constantly playing a weird version of musical chairs every time they leave their space, hoping and praying they will be lucky enough to find one when they get back.

It seems that some levels of the permits are just over sold in general. The upper-level spaces, orange and gold, never seem to be full. These spaces could be converted back to metered or free spaces for the rest of campus to use.

We understand that the school can only do so much as far as the parking situation goes. But we would appreciate it if more consideration was given to the needs of the students and the faculty who need to park on campus on a daily basis.

The Bulletin

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