I am currently a Junior at San Jose State and having just transferred there, am in the midst of a parking crisis. You see, there simply isn’t enough parking on campus. Evidently, they have made it so it is illegal for students to park in the residental area surrounding the campus. This meant more people parking in the parking garages. SJSU’s three parking garages have a total of 4,400 spaces, but that is not nearly enough for over 25,000 enrolled students. Additionally, they hiked up the price of a parking permit. Now the real fun news begins. After ordering my parking permit, I patentiently wait for it to arrive in the mail. It gets to the last week before school and the permit hasn’t shown up. I will have to use the park-and-ride, which is free for the first 2 weeks of school. Because hardly anybody has gotten their permits, EVERYBODY is using the park and ride (Its a parking lot a mile from capus with shuttles to take students to school and back). Often that lot is full and I have to use the overflow lot, which is even FARTHER from campus. The permit arrives a week and a half later. Now, if this was just about me, I would not be ranting, but this is on behaf of all the students who have had to suffer from the incompetence from the Bursar’s office. Many students still have not received their parking permits. Park and ride is no longer free, so those souls who do not yet have their permit have to fork over 4 bucks a day to park, even though they have already paid 115 dollars for the parking permit which they have yet to receive. Do they receive some sort of compensation for getting their permits late? Why, that would make too much sense!
You know, I have yet to meet anyone going to a school that was NOT having a parking crisis. I’m really glad I’m all graduated.
My undergrad didn’t, or perhaps I didn’t notice as I didn’t have a car with me. Here, well, I don’t know that it’s a crisis, really, just a full-contact sport.
gets down on his knees and wails ululating prayers to Fulgence the Transit God for putting McGill downtown with lovely metros and buses all around it
There’s no useful transit near your university?? Jesus, man, that eats! 
Universities are enormous traffic-generators and any municipality worth its salt should have that one figured out rather than try to accomodate 25,000 cars every single day.
That sucks Incubus, and unfortunately it seems all too commonplace for college students across the country.
I had the same problem in Cleveland when I attended CWRU back in '95–97. Buy the permit, display it properly, but bend over and get shafted anyway because there aren’t any spaces open in your assigned lot. Oh, and I got to pay $348 a semester for this privilege. :eek:
I don’t miss that one everloving bit, I assure you.
bella
Try bringing your car to college in Boston.
Uggg. Or here: we’re the largest (non-medical, or perhaps even including them) university that’s a part of this State’s system. We also have the largest amount of commuter students. How much parking do we have? Barely more than schools half to two-thirds our size. And what did they do? Take out about a 1/6 of one of the main parking lots (200-250 spaces or so, IIRC) to build a building, and took out another one (30 spaces or so) to build yet another building!
The public transit here sucks, to boot. For the most part, if you’re close enough to the school you’re better off walking or riding a bike than taking the bus. You’ll get here quicker, and not have to worry about missing the last bus of the night if you’re taking an evening class.
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Whats worse, is next year things are going to be far worse. Apparently because of California’s deficit, my schools budget will be cut by 20 percent next year. I wouldn’t be surprised if the cost of a parking permit doubles :mad:
As for mass transit, all of it is so out of the way as to make it take as much time (if not more) to use it than my car. The lightrail makes a stop 12 blocks from the park and ride (which it itself is a mile away from campus) Personally I’d rather growl and snarl at other drivers in the parking garage as I viciously pounce on a vacant spot just on the basis that it takes almost no time to get home when I leave.
There is an article in my school paper about the parking situation just about every day. One article mentioned where the head of the Bursar’s office happened to park (in a reserved spot on campus of course). I would be surprised if that man could find all the pieces of his car when he left that evening. So many disgruntled students would just have a field day thinking up new ways to violate his car.