There is a growing problem on campus involving moped parking. Along with an increase in the cost of parking permits, there has been a noticeable decrease in available parking spots. This has led to a parking nightmare for students trying to get to class on time.
Although the increase in the cost of a permit has irked some students, most say that as long as the spots they were paying for were available, it wouldn’t be an issue. The larger issue students have is that UW Transportation Services expects them to pay for a parking permit that doesn’t guarantee them a parking spot.
I asked several students how often they had trouble finding a spot and found in several problematic areas, people cannot find a spot more than half the time. Parking outside of Ingraham Hall is particularly bad. Nate Straub, a senior majoring in finance, said, “With a removal of available parking spots around Social Sciences, the Ingraham parking lot now gets all the overflow from there, Van Hise and Van Vleck, making it impossible to get a spot.”
With the cost of a permit at $85 and an illegal parking ticket costing an additional $40, the university needs to do something about this problem. I talked to Katie Tetkoski, a junior majoring in finance. With a full schedule and several student org obligations, she found she
was wasting a lot of time walking to class. Her solution, a moped, now
seems to be just another problem. After she “saw five people getting towed at once,” she was so fed up she started a petition to get the university to create more parking spots.
The university has had little to say on the matter, but one student athlete did share an email he received after complaining about getting five tickets in one week. This student, who needs his moped to get to practice and class on time, was told that the reason for the decrease in spots was in response to pedestrian safety issues. The university said mopeds were parking on sidewalks, and so it removed those spots and “created” new ones near Union South and Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery. It is unclear if it created these spots in response to the issue or that the spots simply went up with the new buildings.
In what I see as an attempt to decrease the number of permits, UW has raised permit prices. This does not appear to have worked, or at least not well enough to be noticeable. The problem is that students who use mopeds to commute are not like those who use cars. People who drive into campus understand they will be unable to park close to class and will still have a reasonable walk. But for moped users, the idea is they will be able to avoid the walk to class and get there in a timely manner.
When they are faced with no spots available and five minutes to class, it is unreasonable to expect them to spend 10 minutes driving around looking for a spot and to then walk another 10 minutes to the classroom.
Transportation Services saw the problem last year and went about solving it in completely the wrong way. The reason there was moped-pedestrian interference in high traffic areas last year was because of a lack of parking. Instead of raising the price of permits to deter people from buying them, increase the price and promise students access to parking spots. These high traffic areas like Grainger and the Chemistry and Psychology buildings are not going to go away. Mopeds are a great alternative means of transportation in this city, and fining permit-carrying students who are trying to get to class makes absolutely no sense.
If the university cannot guarantee spots to every permit holder, then it needs to drastically reduce the cost of the increasingly less useful permit. If not, it should at least put all the extra money from these fines and price increases into creating the necessary parking for students. These are mopeds; they are not semi trucks (like the ones blocking parking at Helen C. White). It is not impossible to create enough space to provide every permit holder what they paid for.
Pedestrian safety certainly needs to be a priority, but common sense would say the way to get mopeds off the sidewalk is to have a spot to put them in. So let’s be reasonable, and let them park in peace.
John Waters ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in journalism.
