Students question parking allotment
By Hilaire Fong
Oct. 28, 2002 9:00 p.m.
Despite the efforts of Transportation Services to give parking
spaces to those who need it most, there are numerous students who
feel cheated by the system and question its methods.
There are over 22 thousand parking spaces in UCLA lots, but
there is still a demand for parking among students, staff, faculty,
hospital patients and visitors.
“Specifics need to be looked at in a broader
context,” said Director of Transportation Mark Stocki.
“There is a morass of competing needs in a complex
environment.”
Transportation Services gives parking to those who apply for
permits and people with special allocations.
The permit system is a need-based system, taking into account
factors such as students’ employment and academic
obligations, class standing, commute distance, and child-care and
elder-care requirements.
Transportation services and students sometimes have conflicting
opinions on who should get parking.
“Regents’ scholars have academic allocations,"
Stocki said. “They have an important academic position,
student governance, a high priority that the campus places on
them” he continued.
“Regents’ scholars should not get parking because
they are getting a free education,” said fifth-year
electrical engineering student Craig Riedel. “Also, first-
and second-year students should not get parking over
seniors.”
The applications for parking permits go through a computer
process, in which there is a point system, Stocki said. Students
receive a certain amount of points per “need.” The
computer totals those points, and Transportation Services issues
parking permits to students with the most points.
Using the point system, Transportation Services gave out 4500
parking permits to students this past fall. Teaching and research
assistants increase the number of issued parking permits to
9000.
This point system does not always seem to work out in
students’ eyes. Many who live off campus are still denied
parking, and there are large numbers on the waiting list.
Third-year molecular, cell and developmental biology student
Dilshan Gunawardena lives in Studio City and has an on-campus job.
However, Transportation Services denied him parking, saying it was
unavailable and other people had more points than him.
It takes 45 minutes for Gunawardena to get to campus in the
morning. If he has class at 11:00 he will leave his house at 8:30.
He often has to park south of Wilshire and take the bus to
campus.
“I have to have a safe zone,” Gunawardena said.
“Sometimes it can take an hour to find parking.”
“It is not fair that I have senior status and I do not get
parking,” he said. “They should take more things into
consideration like work and how far you live.”
Gunawardena is not the only one with this problem.
“There are 4300 students on the waiting list,” said
Stocki. “That is the highest it has been in recent
memory.”
Less than a quarter of student parking spaces go to on-campus
residents, Stocki said. He added that resident students are here,
close to most of the activity, so they do not need parking as much
as commuter students do.
Anyone who does not have a parking permit can get a $7 one-day
parking pass from the campus parking kiosks. There are 1,400
one-day parking passes reserved for UCLA medical center patients,
and another 600 passes are available for whoever wants to buy
them.
Even with one-day passes, some students have to park in lots
away from campus. Transportation Services may send students to lot
32, said Stocki.
“One time they made me park by the softball field, which
is the farthest parking point away from campus,” said
Riedel.
“I went to Parking Lot 4 and they told me there was no
parking, but I saw a lot of parking spaces still open,”
fifth-year electrical engineering student Victor Morales said.
Stocki countered, saying “in the past, Transportation
Services has run out of passes. But this year, due to extensive
planning and alternatives, we have had spaces remaining.”
“We are proactively trying to expand and improve
alternative programs,” Stocki said.
Transportation Services encourages people to carpool by offering
guaranteed parking permits for those who do.
Another alternative to driving to campus is the Bruin-Go!
system, which uses the Santa Monica Big Blue Buses.
Transportation Services also promotes the vanpool system by
giving a parking discount to the drivers of the vans. Some cities
that vanpool are over one hundred miles away, such as Moreno
Valley.
The new parking structure under the Intramural Field, across
from Pauley Pavilion will provide 1,500 more parking spaces.
Construction for the structure is way ahead of schedule, said
Stocki. It is expected to be opened for spring quarter 2003.
Parking will be further affected by the state mandate, Tidal
Wave II, in which UCLA will have to house over 4,000 additional
students over the next eight to ten years. UCLA will change from
being a commuter campus to more of a resident campus, which will
lighten the load on the demand for parking, Stocki said.
