Utah State University’s students are becoming enraged with the institutions lack of convenient parking. While buildings keep replacing what is left of the asphalt, the need for a new parking structure is becoming eminent.
Campus parking has become a rising issue as more on-campus lots are being filled with buildings and less convenient parking is available to students, yet few are willing to pay to fix this problem.
According to James Nye, the director of parking and transportation at USU, more parking is being pushed to the outskirts of the University and the Aggie shuttle system is being used as a supplement for this. The 10 operating busses have been put in place so students can park on the outskirts of campus and then be shuttled in closer to where they need to be for classes.
“The shuttle system is the best in the nation,” Nye said, “the busses have GPS tracking devices so you can text the bus to know exactly how long it will be. It usually will take 10 minutes to get to campus.”
Although this method seems like a reasonable solution to on-campus parking, it has not been meeting the needs of all students. For those that travel back and forth from school to work, bussing into campus is not the best option. Those students are looking for fast and easily accessible parking where they can go to class and leave in a timely manner.
“The pace of life is so much busier now. We are trying to work part time, take care of kids and go to school. And due to the pace of life we have to push the students off campus, which is not convenient and not the answer. A parking structure would be best, but people have to be willing to pay for it,” Nye said.
There are 9,000 parking stalls on campus; the majority of these stalls are located in student parking lots called, “blue lots.” According to Nye these stalls are empty most of the day because they are not seen as the “fast and convenient, Wal-Mart-type parking.”
Blue permits are available for the price of $94 for the year. From a student’s perspective, that’s about 13 meals they could be using to buy food, as opposed to parking.
Many students have become enraged at the fact that close, convenient parking is being taken away and those that would like to park closer are paying a lot more to do so.
“They definitely should not be removing parking lots to build more buildings on campus - that just doesn't make sense,” said Zak Hanks, a current student at USU.
If students want a parking structure to be built it will be costly and take time. The Department of Transportation’s funding is not taken from the student’s tuition and fees. They have an allotted budget they are to work with and building an alternate parking structure will take years and be incredibly expensive.
According to Nye, the transportation department has conducted surveys to see if students would be willing to pay more for parking, but not enough are willing to. In order to build a parking structure it would cost around $7.5 million, which is an estimated, $13,000 per stall.
“Students would have to pay more for bad planning on USU’s part,” said Derek Bostock, a former USU student.
A parking structure on campus would still be years away. Until then students have to plan their day around the time it will take to park on campus. There is no fast and easy solution just yet.
“When we lose [parking spaces], we try and replace it someplace else, I don’t anticipate we’ll lose the lots completely… but parking lots are always seen as potential buildings,” Nye said.
(K.Blesch)
No comments:
Post a Comment