Hundreds of dining hall lockers broken despite renovations

Josh Bayne spent 10 minutes standing in the rain outside Bruin Plate Tuesday night waiting for an open locker with his computer bag in hand.

Dozens of lockers were left open along the walls. But as the crowd of wet, frustrated students milling around Bayne quickly discovered, none of the open lockers worked.

“I take my laptop with me to class,” said Bayne, a third-year physics student. “I always have to wait until a working locker is available.”

This problem is commonplace to students who regularly use the dining halls. The Daily Bruin found this week that 400 of the dining hall digital lockers on the Hill – roughly 31 percent in total – do not work.

The lockers do not function properly because of keyboards with dying batteries and misaligned locks, UCLA said in a statement. The university added that sometimes students enter lock codes incorrectly into the keypads, which can cause the lockers to time out and block students from using them.

UCLA said it is currently trying to address the issue by implementing a new monitoring process for the lockers so it can respond more quickly to these problems. The university also apologized for the inconvenience and said its goal is to have 90 percent of the lockers operational at all times.

UCLA has spent more than $115,000 over the past three years to add new dining hall lockers and replacing the existing lockers. The number of lockers increased from 500 to roughly 1,300 with the implementation of the new system.

“The previous lock technology was outdated, and it was time-consuming to maintain and replace broken locks,” UCLA said in the statement.

Previous lock technology used both tokens and keys, which UCLA said cost more than the current system.

Covel Commons has the highest percentage of broken lockers, at 44 percent, and Feast at Rieber has the lowest, at 14 percent, according to The Bruin’s investigation. The Bruin tested every locker on the Hill to see how many locked properly.

Some lockers are missing their locks, some make a beeping noise when codes are put in but don’t lock and some do not register codes at all.

“Either the locking mechanism is dead, or you enter in a code and it makes an error noise,” said Stephen Arnold, a first-year biophysics student. “It’s pretty annoying.”

Roughly half of the broken lockers in Covel Commons have stickers marking them as defunct, but at every other dining hall, the broken lockers are unmarked. This can cause long waits, especially at the De Neve dining hall and Bruin Plate, where the functional lockers quickly fill up during dining hours.

Students are often forced to try multiple lockers to find a working one, or stand around and wait for an open locker for five to 10 minutes, adding to traffic outside the dining halls.

“I’ve tried two lockers just now and neither worked,” said Kenal Chan, a first-year ecology, behavior and evolution student, outside De Neve dining hall on Tuesday.

Some students, however, said they think UCLA’s updates to the locker system are positive overall.

Mike Hsu, a recent UCLA alumnus, said he comes back to campus once or twice a week and usually eats in the dining halls.

He says he prefers the digital system to the past lockers, which used keys and coins provided by dining hall staff to open and close lockers.

“It was a hassle to carry the keys around, so I think this system is definitely better,” Hsu said.

Some students said they fear the risk of theft that could come with leaving bags in broken lockers or out in the open.

“I would never (use a broken locker),” said Amanda Nguyen, a second-year neuroscience student. “I always wait.”

Nguyen tried more than seven lockers at De Neve Tuesday evening before finding one that worked.

Sam Lin, a third-year psychology student, had to use an unlocked, broken locker at De Neve after trying more than six different lockers.

“I am kind of worried,” Lin said. “It’s a brand-new backpack. But when I have my laptop I have to wait until I find a locker that actually closes.”

However, Arnold said he is not worried about others taking his belongings.

“People put things on top of the lockers all the time, and nobody ever really takes them,” Arnold said. “And they all seem to get fixed eventually, but it just takes a really long time.”

The UCLA statement did not include any information on rates of theft since the new lock system was implemented.

Some students said they would like to see changes implemented to improve the function of the lockers.

“I’d like to see more lockers,” Bayne said. “And someone regulating them would be nice, to make sure people don’t just leave, (for example), a single umbrella (in the locker).”

UCLA said it encourages students to report problems with the lockers to hosts or management.