TTU Parking: Garages

While the seemingly vacant but always sold out Flint Parking Garage may currently be the only garage on the Texas Tech University campus, the Texas Tech Transportation and Parking Services Department has plans to build a second garage in the near future.

A Weeks Hall Entrance (Photo by Evan Dixon)

Eric Crouch, the managing director of parking services, said the department is eyeing a location on the southeast side of campus for the future parking garage, and the Weeks Hall location — around 15th and Akron — is the next prime spot.

“Barring anything else coming along, I think I would still build it there because you know something’s going to happen to that Weeks location,” Crouch said. “It’s just too good of a spot.”

Crouch said the Weeks Hall location is the only vacant place on the southeast side, and the future use of that space — which is located close to the Student Union Building — will drive more traffic to an already busy side of campus.

“Traffic in the SUB is just growing by leaps and bounds, and so there’s a lot of visitor and student traffic in that area,” Crouch said. The parking facility, Crouch said, would have a lot of faculty and staff parking to help “green up”  the Administration Building parking lot — which currently sees a lot of unsafe student and pedestrian crossing traffic.

Eric Crouch, managing director for Transportation & Parking Services

He said Chancellor Emeritus Kent Hance wanted to reduce the amount of parking in the Admin lot — making the area a pedestrian, park-like space and relocating the displaced employees to the structure or another lot.

According to the 2011 transportation parking plan received in response to a Texas Public Information Act request, the recommended parking garage would contain 600 spots, and it would address increases in employee and visitor demand. The structure would also serve as a transport hub, Crouch said. Off-campus buses would drop off students on one side and on-campus buses would pick up on the other side. It would also include bicycle facilities with amenities such as a bike shop, showers and locker rooms.

The south side of the RaiderPark parking garage

Crouch said initial studies indicated the need for a new garage would require one to be built by 2015, but the construction of the Raider Park parking garage across from the Jones AT&T Stadium on the Marsha Sharp Freeway provided a four or five-year delay in that need. RaiderPark parking garage, which is not owned by the university and instead 1,000 spaces are leased to the school by Lubbock development company Tao Development and Lubbock business owner Clayton Isom, hasn’t been a money-maker for Tech, and has actually been losing money since its construction in 2009.

New building construction will play a role in the matter, but Crouch said he foresees the need for a new garage between 2018 to 2020. The potential garage’s future also depends on the funding possibilities. The garage will be built when either construction at the Weeks Hall location demands parking options or the department receives a federal grant for the facility — whichever happens first. The university will pay for parking ventures tied to new building construction, and federal grants are desirable because they pay off the construction without affecting parking costs.

Aerial of the Flint Parking Garage, courtesy of the Transportation and Parking Services website

The parking system completely paid for the Flint Garage, he said, which was an $11.5 million, 791-space project. “We didn’t have the reserves built up for it,” Crouch said, “so the only way to do that then was to raise permit prices.”

Crouch said Flint costs $1.2 million a year in debt service — with another couple of hundred thousand dollars in operating costs. It costs $1,500 per space each year to run the garage, he said, and most students are not willing to pay that much for a spot.

Garage permits pay back only half of the cost, he said, and the parking system picks up the rest of the financial weight. He said the 11-year-old structure is a little over halfway through paying off the 20-year bonds.

The garage is currently oversold at 1.16 permits per space, but the garage never appears to be full. In addition, the garage saw more than 3,500 tickets in the garage’s 212-space visitor pay-to-park area during the last four long semesters before this spring — ranking it the eighth most ticketed location on campus.

Flint Parking Garage near the Chitwood/Weymouth Complex

This is because students have various schedules and parking services is cautious not to overbook the garage too much, Crouch said, which could cause people who pay to have permits not receive the spot they paid for.

There are only 75 commuter spaces available in the 791-space garage. The other problem, Crouch said, is the department would let anyone on the wait list in years past, but only a handful of people on the list would accept a spot when offered one. “Five percent of people on the list would actually end up buying a permit,” Crouch said, “and so it would take months to work through the wait list.”

Second Level of Flint Garage

He said out of the 3,000 students who used to be on the wait list, only around 150 students were actually serious enough to be on the list. This year, he said, the department decided to offer open spots to the graduate students on the list first because they were more likely to accept the offer, and he has seen more utilization of the garage than ever before.

Crouch said he has been discussing with the Student Government Association the idea to continue offering the first spots to graduate students and then offer remaining spots to the undergraduate students in colleges near the garage — such as architecture and education. “We’ve just got to find a way to be able to fill that thing faster,” Crouch said. “The sale rate is pretty good right now. It’s just getting there will take us the better part of the fall semester.” Related articles: TTU Parking: By the Numbers TTU Parking: Enforcement TTU Parking: Money TTU Parking: The Future