Parking In Crisis

I pull into the parking lot just south of campus hoping that this morning will not be like all the mornings previous, but I should know better. My experiences should have taught me that if one does not arrive to school at an unseemly hour of the morning there will be no unfilled spaces in which to park my car. I should also have learned that there would neither be any spaces in the next lot nor any lots near campus. Parking is at a premium at BYU, and hundreds if not thousands of students are faced with this crisis each and every day. For some it is a matter of convenience to save a few minutes in their daily commute. For others who live at home or a great distance from campus it is a very serious problem when there is no place to park. This parking crisis must be addressed in a more caring fashion. Too long has the BYU Parking Office stood by and simply reinforced its existing policy. There must be a temporary redistribution of parking spaces that tries to accommodate as many as possible and plans must begin to improve the parking situation by increasing the total number of accessible parking spaces.
The number of parking spots available to students does not equal the demand, and is not adequate for the student population attending BYU. For the last semester, there were almost ten thousand Y undergraduate student parking permits issued. This is the lowest number of permits seen in the past several years, dropping by almost eight thousand permits since 2005. Though we have seen a considerable drop in students applying for permits there are still too few parking spots available to those that apply. In fact there is a shortage of more than two thousand parking spots.
The A faculty and C housing on the other hand have a surplus of prime parking spaces. There were approximately three hundred A faculty permits, and several hundred C housing permits issued. This makes for a combined surplus of more than four thousand parking spots. These statistics are easily found in the BYU Police Department Parking Office yearly publication. These spaces that are going unused by faculty and housing permit holders should be opened for undergraduates to park in. After eight in the morning, when professors and other faculty have arrived, these lots should be open for all parking pass holders to use without the fear of being ticketed.
Many of the parking slots assigned to undergraduate students also go unused each day. Included in the parking for undergraduates are the entire Marriott Center parking lot and the parking lot for Lavell Edwards Stadium. According to the BYU Police Department Parking Office’s statistics, the walk from the Marriott Center is nearly ten minutes to the classrooms on campus and the walk from Lavell Edwards Stadium is more than twenty minutes. These large parking lots that account for a huge portion of what the Parking Office has designated as undergraduate parking are the furthest from campus and least attractive to students.
The parking available is in need of a major reapportioning. It appears as though the needed parking spaces exist for the current demand, but much of that parking is being unused. The faculty and housing parking have been allotted too many spaces for the number of permits issued. This is not a matter of only a few spaces either; this is an error of more than four thousand spaces. The faculty has understandably been given the spaces nearest to campus, but it should be a crime to leave so many spaces unoccupied each day. These four thousand spaces would greatly improve the current parking situation.
For a temporary fix, all that needs to be done is to re-designate several faculty lots as undergraduate and graduate student parking. It should be obvious from the statistics that the parking office has gathered that there are thousands of spaces being unused. This would alleviate the parking space deficit which undergraduate students currently face. In fact with the current number of permits issued there would be more than enough parking for every person with a permit.
This would not be the end of BYU’s parking problems. As previously mentioned, we are currently seeing the lowest number of permits issued in the past several years. This is likely due to the rising gas prices of the past few months as a result of an uncertain economy and national future. When these external influences begin to let up there will likely be a renewed surge of students who are more willing to drive a car to school. The number of permits issued in 2005 was greater than twenty-five thousand. The current parking space total including the Marriott Center and Lavell Edwards Stadium would not even accommodate half of the permits seen in 2005.
A new solution is in order. The overall parking space total needs to be increased to meet the demands of a growing university. A permanent solution to the parking problems BYU has seen for years must begin immediately. There is very little unused property in and around the BYU campus, and I would hate to see our beautiful campus marred by a large unsightly parking lot. BYU is definitely a walking campus. It has been designed that way to incorporate the beauty of the outdoors. Any parking solution would have to be a compromise between the convenience of close proximity to classrooms and risking damage to the beauty which has been created with such thought and care.
The first solution I would suggest is a shuttle service from outlying parking lots such as the Marriott Center and Lavell Edwards Stadium that would pick up and drop off students along the loop around campus made by North, West, South, and East Campus Drive. A shuttle to and from these parking lots on an hourly basis would encourage students to park further away from classrooms. A shuttle would decrease the fear of having to walk that distance and risk being late for class. The Utah Transit Authority currently has a shuttle that runs hourly from Lavell Edwards Stadium to the Wilkinson Center. However the Wilkinson Center is only slightly closer to classrooms than it would be to simply walk from the stadium. The Wilkinson Center is also the only location on campus where the Utah Transit Authority busses pick up and drop off students. The 90 dollar bus pass also hardly seems worth it for the short ride from Lavell Edwards Stadium to the Wilkinson Center.
A shuttle pass of some sort would be needed to fund the proposed campus shuttle. However, the parking shuttle pass would be considerably less in cost than the Utah transit Authority bus pass. A shuttle pass would also bring you to the door of most classroom buildings on campus.
The second solution would be to build parking structures in the lots south of campus. This solution would be a permanent addition of thousands of parking spaces. These lots are the nearest to many classrooms and are in high demand. Building the parking structures in these lots would not damage the beauty of the campus. They would blend in well with the multi-story housing buildings which already exist in this location. To cover the cost of a permanent solution such as this, permit fees would have to be reinstituted. BYU has seen that people are willing to pay such a fee to park. Since the fee was abolished several years ago there has been no noticeable change in the number of permits issued. A small fee of ten dollars or less per permit would make enough money to pay off a parking garage in several years.
The parking crisis is very real. Complaints have been heard for a long time about the parking situation because there has always been a problem. Students will continue to drive even when pressured not to. They know that it will not hurt them to walk and that taking the bus is a viable option that may also help the environment. The simple truth is that human nature is about self preservation; if there is an easier way to do something, in this case traveling to school, one will take it. Therefore, plans must be made to accommodate the way people will inevitably act and to make it safer for them to do so.
As evident by their own report the BYU Parking Office has poorly designated the lots on and near campus by not distributing them where demand is present. Convenience is an issue to many students. The BYU Parking Office does not want to hear complaints that merely deal with a student’s convenience, but when that lack of convenience compromises a student’s learning it becomes a worthy argument. The solutions presented are doable and have been implemented in other locations. There are viable temporary fixes, but they will only cover up the problem for a while. Now is the time for a permanent solution to our parking needs.