A recent whiteboard question at the University of New Brunswick’s Harriet Irving Library read “what are your thoughts on campus parking?”
The student responses were overwhelmingly negative.
One response reads “We already pay for everything else. We shouldn’t have to pay just to get to school.” Other responses mention how few spots are available, how difficult it is to obtain one without arriving at 8 a.m., or how the price of parking passes, along with the recent rise in tuition, is too expensive.
One student simply wrote “If we’re paying this much… do better biatch.”
“It’s not great. It’s not good. It’s hardly okay,” said Kayden Degen, a second-year St. Thomas University student.
Degen frequently arrives early for class, because with a bad hip and back, he tries to avoid the long walk from the NBCC parking lot as much as possible. He lives in Oromocto, which means he leaves at 7:30 a.m. to get a spot close to STU campus.
Degen’s classes don’t start until 10 a.m.
“When I get here early, I’ll just sit in my car,” he said. “Sometimes I’ll nap, sometimes I’ll do homework, and somebody got very mad at me because they wanted me to move and I was like, ‘I have a class, I’m going to stay here.’”
Fellow STU student Emma Craib had similar gripes with campus parking.
“If you’re not here by 8:30, they’re typically all gone,” she said.
St. Thomas University, along with UNB, is situated on an incline, quite steep in some areas, so parking spots found near classes are hot commodities. But for many students, finding parking close to their classes is an uphill battle, literally.
Like Degen, Craib arrives on campus between 7:30 and 8:30 a.m. to grab a parking spot. She has mobility issues and does not have an accessibility pass, which means getting a spot close to her classes is crucial.
“If I need to park up in NBCC parking, it’s very hard for me to get down and get to class,” she said.
Despite many student’s claims of inadequate parking on campus, Don Allen, director of Security and Traffic for UNB and director of Security for STU, said campus parking is sufficient.
He notes that in 2018, UNB hired local engineering company EXP to review the parking on campus, which found the parking to be adequate.
“I guess the challenge is, there are peak times when there’s high demand,” he said.
A potential factor of this high demand is the over-selling of parking passes. The practice of over-selling in the parking industry is commonplace, especially on campuses as not all students will be there at the same time. Allen claims an over-sell of 20 to 40 per cent is the standard in the parking industry.
Although records for 2023 are not yet available, he says that in 2018-19, campus parking over-sell was 31 per cent, and last year, the over-sell was zero per cent.
In the last few years, changes due to COVID-19 have disrupted UNB parking, but this year Allen notes a return to normal. This includes a “significant push” to have enforcement, which is why there has been an increase in parking tickets.
“Every year we get complaints that there’s a lack of availability,” said Allen. “So we want to make sure that the people who are paying for parking have a place to park.”
For some students, paying for parking proves difficult. Degen deems parking passes to be “ridiculously expensive.”
“I could only afford it because I got my student loans in,” said Degen.
There haven’t been any one-size-fits-all solutions proposed to fix the parking issues on campus, so students are navigating and adapting to find adequate parking for themselves, whether it’s leaving early to find a spot or choosing lesser used parking lots at different buildings on campus. Nevertheless, some students remain displeased with the state of campus parking this year.
“It’s frustrating, especially when you’re walking to class and see five cars waiting to park, because that interrupts the flow of traffic,” said Craib. “So it is frustrating if you’re not planning your day around parking.”
