Texas Tech University Transportation and Parking Services has issued 135,332 parking citations since January 2012. That’s the equivalent of nearly a ticket per student per semester for the last four semesters.
Stacy Moncibaiz, marketing coordinator for Transportation & Parking Services
By comparison, Texas State University – which has a slightly larger enrollment than Tech – issued just 36,761 citations on its San Marcos campus in 2013. In the same time, Texas Tech issued nearly twice that number – a difference of 26,000 more tickets between the two universities.
Despite the staggering number of citations issued, many of them for students who parked on campus without a “valid permit,” Transportation and Parking Services has no current plans to construct more parking lots on campus, according to Stacy Moncibaiz, marketing coordinator.
Moncibaiz also added that both the Commuter North and Commuter West parking lots reached a sell-out status this year, leading to an increase in students using alternative transportation like buses and bicycles on campus.
“They’re really utilizing the bus system. We have a lot of cyclists now, and a lot of students are walking too,” Moncibaiz said.
In an email, Moncibaiz said that new lot or garage construction is usually tied to the construction of new buildings, such as the parking accommodations for the newly built Rawls College of Business Administration.
“Nearly all lot creations or major expansions are tied to building construction,” Moncibaiz said.
Moncibaiz said that on-campus construction is usually the factor that adds or changes parking lots, but that a new building’s contractors usually attend to parking requirements on their own.
“If it involves a new or expanded lot tied to construction of a new building, like the Rawls College of Business Administration or Talkington Residence Hall, the building’s plans include parking plans,” Moncibaiz said. “Parking needs are assessed by looking to the needs of building and available space.”
Lots that aren’t connected to a specific building on campus, such as commuter lots, are paid for through federal grants, Moncibaiz said.
“Nearly all lot creations or major expansions are tied to building construction,” Moncibaiz said. “The one exception has been the commuter satellite lot, S1, located off Texas Tech Parkway and 10th Street. It was made possible by a grant from the [Federal Transit Administration].”
The Raider Park parking garage, which stands north of Jones AT&T Stadium, was built by a private developer for $18 million, and contains 942 student weekday spaces. Tech has lost more than $600,000 leasing these spaces. This lease, which expires in 2017, calls for the developer, Clayton Isom and his company Tao Development, to make up any Tech losses.
But with 1,839 acres of campus in Lubbock, that’s a long walk to class. According to the profile for Tech on the US News and World Report’s education rankings, the Lubbock campus is one of the largest in the country, while comparably sized schools elsewhere in Texas have approximately half the acreage of Tech.
Tech’s institutional goal of 40,000 students by 2020 also adds to the strain of parking on campus. In 2011, Texas Tech’s enrollment was just over 31,000 total students, but the total number of parking spaces on campus added up to just under 18,000.
In 2010, Transportation and Parking Services had a study conducted by Walker Parking Services, which concluded the existing commuter supply would meet the future demand.
The 2011 transportation plan indicated there was a surplus of 1,369 on-campus parking places, but if growth on track with the 2020 goal continues, there will be a deficit of 1,877 spaces, thanks to new residence hall construction and a growth in employee population.
The current system the department uses to issue citations is a license plate recognition system that electronically scans the license plates of parked cars on campus, eliminating the need for paper citations and introducing a system of emailing citations directly to violators.
According to the transportation plan, the license plate recognition system was introduced in 2010: “When complete, this project will eliminate the need for physical permits, improve ease of use for customers and allow for the enforcement of a larger parking system with minimal increases in staffing.”
The system, according to a case study conducted by Capital Communications, was a university investment of a quarter of a million dollars – covering equipment, software, and vehicles.
The study said that the savings from the investment would total nearly $200,000, drastically cutting costs for services like enforcement and permit mailing, thanks to the paperless system.
Since the introduction of the paperless system, there has been a marked increase in the numbers of citations issued per year: an increase of some 10,000 tickets from 2012 to 2013.
Eric Crouch, managing director for Transportation & Parking Services, said citations make up approximately one-fifth of the $5.5 million annual budget for the department, and that permit sales make up the remainder of the revenue. According to Crouch, the department does anticipate a certain amount of money within the budget from citation revenue.
“We budget $1,050,000 a year for citation revenue,” Crouch said. “In all the years I’ve been involved with parking, it’s never dropped below that. Some years it’s really close to that. Some years it may be 1.2 or .3 million. So it kind of fluctuates, but we try to be real conservative on that estimate in the event that everything works out and there aren’t as many citations.”
Crouch said his department tries to accommodate new parking with research of campus infrastructure through ‘snapshots’ of campus every fall semester that capture data about residence hall and parking lot occupancy. The department then compiles the research using a formula that will show peak utilization that will lead to parking adequacy.
“That helps us zero in on additional parking, infrastructure or surface. Or, [for example], if we’re really riding the line in the southeast quadrant but they plop something down at the Weeks [Hall] site that’s going to drive 500 people a day there, then we can inform that discussion and say we’re really kind of on the line, that’s going to push us over so we’ve got to do something to address that demand.”
Crouch said that further accommodation for parking on campus is in the works for his department, and that several different entities have come together to work toward more convenient parking on campus.
“We look at the parking and transportation system as one big system,” Crouch said, “because if you do something to busing, that affects parking. If you do something to parking, that affects busing, and so we try to balance that. When the chancellor announced the goal to reach 40,000 students by 2020, one of the first things that happened was the staff started work on what we do for infrastructure, buildings, and residence halls, and how to make sure we’ve got enough spaces. Obviously one of the things that was asked early on was parking.”
Crouch, who earned both his undergraduate and master’s degrees from Tech, said he got his fair share of citations while he was a student in the 1990s. He said he distinctly remembers a still-employed accountant who released his car to him after it was towed from campus.
“She doesn’t remember it. I remember it. I was mortified.”
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