The clock is ticking, and I realize I’ve already spent 20 minutes circling the same few blocks and still can’t find a single legal spot in which to park.
Sound familiar?
That’s because it seems there’s so many of us, and so few parking spots on the University of Florida campus.
UF parking is so bad that I’ve had a nightmare about it. Well, a nightmare-turned-dream, because in it, I eventually find a great spot right in front of my sorority house. (I knew then and there it had to be a dream.)
But my nightmare doesn’t compare to some people’s everyday parking reality. I’ve been told horror stories.
Via: Huffington Post
“Once my friend stood by my car for me while I ran inside to grab my keys and go move my car out of a certain lot by my dorm that’s prohibited on game days, and the person ticketing walked up to her and asked, ‘Which car is yours, so I can ticket it first?”
“I got a ticket for parking in an old sorority-house mom spot. The spot is no longer a house mom spot; it doesn’t have the designated sign, just leftover paint. I appealed it three times, considering it’s a legal spot. I even went in to talk to TAPS (Transportation and Parking Services), but still had to pay.”
“I pulled up to Broward to grab something out of my dorm that I had forgotten, and saw the person ticketing. I walked up and explained my situation, and asked if I could run up to my room for two minutes, to which he replied, ‘Yeah, sure!’ When I walked back down in under the two-minute timeframe, I came back to a ticket. I confronted him about it, and his response was, ‘Just appeal it.’”
I’m sure we’ve all heard of and even experienced similar scenarios during our time here. The Gainesville Sun published an article in 2005 talking about our parking miseries, but it seems little has changed in the past 10 years.
So what’s the deal?
First things first, there are data that prove the giant discrepancy between the number of UF students and the number of parking spots available to them (no surprise there).
VIa; Pic Photos
According to the director of TAPS, there are 23,000 parking spaces across the UF campus. That number is 26,785 short of 49,785 — the number of students enrolled at UF, according to its admissions website.
Additionally, the university has a large amount of parking debt from the building of garages: $50,315,000 in 2007. And it’s been steadily increasing ever since. You would think that our money spent on decals and tickets would be going toward paying this debt, and that’s why the price of parking keeps increasing, but it isn’t certain whether that’s the case. In fact, we still aren’t sure where our money is going at all.
One document claimed that students’ money from parking couldn’t be used to pay this debt because those funds went directly to TAPS (an auxiliary company, connected to UF as a branch.) Another said that the UF Cashier was the one receiving the funds. So, jury is still out on that one.
Something obviously needs to be done. Be it lowering the prices of decals and tickets (after figuring out where our money is going), creating more parking spaces or decreasing the number of decals sold, or changing the colored decals to allot for more student spaces, something must be implemented.
Until then, I will continue to write lovely appeals with elaborate explanations and viciously stalk Norman and Sorority Row until someone leaves.
Research/data courtesy of UF journalism student Jordan Albright.
Featured photo courtesy of: HerCampus
