There’s an academic joke that says that the job of a university president is really pretty simple. To ensure happiness on campus, all he or she needs to do is make sure that there’s sex for the undergraduates, food for the graduate students, and parking for the faculty.
It’s certainly true that parking enforcement has been one of the most efficient departments on every campus I’ve been associated with. At Maryland, it was practically the only efficient thing there, but it was a fearsome oepration. I once parked my car in a faculty lot just long enough to run inside and drop a homework set in a professor’s mailbox, and came out to find a ticket on my car. Duane Simpkins, the point guard on the basketball team, got in trouble with the NCAA because he ran up over $8,000 in parking fines, and sports pundits boggled at the number. All I can say is that anyone who found that improbable had never tried to park a car in College Park.
The other big problem with campus parking isthat the rates can be pretty outrageous. One of the grad students at Yale when I was there had calculated that it was actually cheaper to have your car towed once a semester than to pay the parking fee. I never checked the math, but it cost a lot of money to get a sticker for an inconvenient lot. I lived close enough to the lab that I opted to walk in instead, and take my chances with parking illegaly on those days when I did drive in.
Why do I mention this? I just had to renew my parking sticker, having accumulated three tickets over the past week. I haven’t done it until now, because they recently raised the rates, and I’m planning to get a new car soon. Of course, it’s a little silly, given what the rate actually is, which I’ll put below the fold, lest it outrage people at larger campuses…
We pay $15/year for a faculty parking sticker. Which is actually mildly controversial, as up until a year or two ago, the rate was $15 for the life of the car. You paid once for a sticker, and it was good forever.
That’s just a little bit less of a burden that at Yale and Maryland. It doesn’t keep the faculty from getting annoyed at the rate hike, though. It’s the principle of the thing, damn it.
Fifteen dollars?
As in a one followed by a five?
Boy are you not getting any sympathy.
When I moved back to the US, I was handed a copy of an article in The Times which explained the hierarchy at US universities (eg undergrads are above grad students etc), which noted that the parking office was the most powerful entity on your typical US campus.
I walk to work, and have not bought a single parking permit since I moved back.
It is a matter of principle.
I have the $240 taken out of my academic stipend. For one academic year.
At Colorado I had a few friends who were “Parking Nazis,” but it only got me out of one ticket. At least the buses were free.
Wow! I think we paid $60 a quarter at my community college. That was good in retrospect. The lots around our company charge $125 a month.
You have it easy.
*weeps*
I think folks around here pay $40/month, or something similarly outrageous. I park on the street about 8 blocks away, myself.
Faculty/Staff parking here is $50 per year, and, yes, the parking enforcers are ever vigilant.
Heh. I pay $200/year for parking, and people from other campuses say *I* have nothing to complain about.
My observation has been that the people who run the parking at almost any instutition (academic or otherwise) are the biggest control-freak power-made authorotarian Nazis in the organization.
-Rob
Its about $600 a year here, and you have to take a bus after parking.
When I was in grad school in Madison, parking was ~$200 for the semester at a lot that was half a mile farther from the chemistry building than my apartment was. (The longitudinal extent of the UW-Madison campus is quite extraordinary.) So, no parking for me. However, a fellow grad student lived on the other side of town and needed to drive. His solution was just to park all day in a 2-hour zone a few blocks from the building and accept the possibilty that he might pick up a ~$30 ticket for his trouble. Never once in the ~3 years that he played that game did he spend more on tickets than the parking permit would have cost him.
I’ve been told that around here (Idaho State University), parking tickets are actually considered a very important revenue stream by the college (which explains why they’re building a fancy new mystery building that seems to be described variously as more dorm rooms, more classrooms, more student areas, and I’m guessing whatever else will be percieved as favorable to readers, rather than more parking close to the lower campus.)
On the upside, the furthest corner of the furthest parking lot is free…(and for comparison, the parking rates were, as I recall, something like $35/semester – though with the low wages in the area means that’s a little higher than it sounds.
UC/Irvine vigorously tickets Handicapped spaces. Perhaps the DCF/ROI projection is that cripples cannot make it to court to protest and they are swimming in oodles of entitlement funding anyway. You should be paying $150/quarter and have to endure three days of face time administrative review by diversity hires. Faculty Parking is a privilege.
When the California Highway Patrol overmuch enforces speed limits on freeways, CHP get shot. They all wear vests now, so folks use rifles and aim for the head. This is tecchnically called “punctuated equilibrium.”
I believe the current rate is $792 a year here. To be fair, everyone pays the same rate, though the parking office gives faculty and staff first dibs to cut down on the number of trustafarians driving onto campus.
The weird thing, locally, is that the parking and transportation must be completely self-funding. So everything from the bus pass ($3 a month) to a new parking structure gets subsidized by the parking fees.
The consequence of this is that the parking folks can make a new lot, clearing and flattening land (basically all of campus is on the side of a hill). Then, a department can say, “oh, that would be a great spot for our new building!” Not a cent need be transfered to the parking people for their costs. And the funds for the new building cannot be spent on parking, because parking must be self-funding.
The logic is impeccable. Or something.
I take the bus.
I don’t know what the faculty pay but at the U of M (Canadian version) the rate was $275 when I started my undergrad degree and was up to $375 four years later when I graduated. To add insult to injury they oversold the lots by almost 50%. Halfway through first semester once many people have withdrawn or decided that they aren’t actually going to attend the lectures of the classes they are in it becomes almost managable, but it is outrageous to have paid so much only to have to pay to park in the $1 lot about half a mile away from the campus anyway (which is a long way in -30C weather)
One student I knew elected to park his car illegally just so that he could get a ticket. Instead of paying it off he just kept putting it on his windsheld whenever he needed to park anywhere. It worked for a while, he just couldn’t take books out of the library or add/witdraw from courses until it got paid off. He got a pretty hefty fine when one of the parking people actually took the time to read the ticket however (I don’t know if it was more or less than the year pass would have been).
We pay over $200 per year for a “general” student parking permit at my university. This entitles us to park in lots that are typically too far from our classes to justify paying the fee… At least in my opinion. I commute to campus, but I’m fortunate in that I get dropped off in the morning and picked up in the evening, and I don’t, personally, have to worry about parking. (At least at this juncture…) If I get my research fellowship, I will then have to purchase a parking permit, as I will be spending the majority of my time at school… I don’t know where I’m going to come up with an extra $200– my only income is my financial aid.
$15 a year is nothing. 😉
One student I knew elected to park his car illegally just so that he could get a ticket. Instead of paying it off he just kept putting it on his windsheld whenever he needed to park anywhere.
I did that when I was an undergrad, and it worked for about two months. Then I came back to find a second ticket on the car, with “Nice try!” written in the margin.
$15 a year is nothing. 😉
It’s a big jump from “free,” though…
The last time I paid for a parking permit at Maryland, it was something like $55/semester. I actually paid that for a year longer than I really needed to, just because I won the lottery for a spot in the garage in the center of campus, and I didn’t want to give that up.
My university is so backasswards that it’s cheaper to buy a parking pass than a bus pass. That means that grad students who live too far away to walk and don’t get a free bus pass with their apartment lease, drive to campus rather than bussing it. Of course, grad student parking is nowhere near the academic buildings, so they end up taking the free on-campus bus from their parking lot. Yeah, they chose to drive then bus rather than just bus.
I don’t deal with that stuff — I’ve always walked or biked to campus. I’d rather ride my bike in sub-zero temps with a foot of snow on the ground than take a bus.
The going rate for a parking pass at UCSB is $432 a year, which of course is well out of my price range. In addition, it costs to park your car on campus on nights and weekends, but the students at least voted to pay a lock-in fee to cover that.
Then this year, when applying for that already-paid-for night and weekend parking permit, we were charged an extra five dollars for shipping and handling. For a sticker. Queries for how a 39-cent stamp, an envelope, and a minimum-wage envelope stuffer could total five dollars went unanswered.
I’m in the same boat as Brad Holden, above, with the $792 parking permits for faculty. When I took an administrative job that requires official travel around and on/off campus fairly often, I got the right to request a special permit allowing me to park at meters or beyond the time limit in 20 minute spots, etc., “to ease [my] movement around campus,” for a mere $1386/year! I skipped that administrative perk, although there might have been bragging rights in paying the highest parking fee I’ve ever heard of on any American campus….
Free. Gratis. For nothing. No permit.
We should use it as selling point: “Move to Aarhus University
and Park for Free”.
I park for free in St. Andrews…
I was at UW in Seattle for a while and I’m not sure what the deal with parking was there, but a bus pass was $60ish a quarter, which was a great deal (as I didn’t have a car) and allowed me to use a range of public transport at any time of the day and at weekends.
Yale has a Marxist parking system: the higher your salary, the more you pay.