Campus parking passes for students were sold out before the first class started. A yearly occurrence, students looking for a parking pass during orientation week found themselves on a waiting list for a parking space on campus.</p>
“Every year this time there is a waiting list, and then we clear the list as we figure out where there is space available. And we are pretty confident there is space available this year,” said Tom Galloway, director of custodial and grounds services.
Overall, the number of parking spots has not changed much over the past year. While construction of new buildings has eaten up parking spots and the new engineering 7 building will take more spots away from Lot B, the purchase of the BlackBerry buildings came with 1,000 new spots. Despite maintaining the number of parking spots, according to Galloway, it is becoming more challenging to accommodate people’s parking location preference.
“The waiting list is only about 350 or so right now. We certainly have enough space for all those people, but we are also trying to accommodate into what lots they would like to go,” said Galloway. “So we have space up at UWP, we have space up at TechTown, but we are going to try to place people where they are best suited depending on where most of their classes are.”
TechTown is located further than the current farthest parking lot from Ring Road, Lot X. A shuttle runs from Ring Road to Lot X. The university is looking at the possibility of expanding this service to TechTown
“We are going to try to arrange that, it doesn’t currently because there is nobody in there other than people that work in the building. We are talking about extending the shuttle out there. Now that is not our shuttle, that shuttle actually is funded by the provost, so it will have to go through him to agree to extend the shuttle up to TechTown,” said Galloway.
For those students on the waiting list, they should find out where they will be allocated a parking spot fairly soon.
“It will be in the next week or so,” said Galloway. “This is very much the same as other years.”
