Students already frustrated with campus parking haven’t seen anything yet. Although construction and general congestion has made parking on campus an ordeal this semester, Thursday night’s football game will pose the most arduous challenge yet for faculty and student parkers.
On Thursday, the U will be opening all pay and A-lots after 3 p.m. to the Crimson Club and general public for football parking. Students and faculty who are already parked will not be fined or expelled from the newly opened lots, but anyone seeking parking Thursday afternoon or evening will find that open spots are scarce.
Pay and A-lots are currently open to the general public on Saturdays and Sundays. Those who take advantage of open Saturday parking spaces know how difficult it can be to find a spot, even on a day when there aren’t any classes. But on Thursday, class is still very much in session, even during the afternoon and evening. By filling what are already crowded parking lots with football fans, the U is effectively revoking still more parking availability to students and faculty members who pay to park there, as if the current state of parking wasn’t enough.
On top of that, the Universe Project plans to eventually replace the Rice-Eccles Stadium parking lot with a shopping center that will compound the problem in the future. Probably exceeding capacity, even more parking will spill into lots that rightly belong to students and faculty.
Alma Allred, director of Parking and Transportation Services at the U, said part of the reason the U is catering to the parking needs of football-goers is because of the attention the U will be getting from television networks. But to say that student and faculty parking spots should be given to fans because the football team will be on national or regional television seems like a weak correlation. This decision reflects the general lack of concern and respect the U seems to have for the parking needs of its own students and faculty.
Instead of freely distributing to fans parking spaces that students pay for and dearly need, the U should encourage fans to use mass transit. Last year, TRAX was an enormously popular way to travel to home games and eliminates the need for limited parking.
Meanwhile, permit lots should be reserved for those who need and pay for them, not given away for the sake of convenience.