When the number of tickets in Lot 11B shot up by more than 525 percent last month, it wasn’t necessarily because there was a major increase in illegal parking in the lot near the University View.
This year, there may have just been more DOTS parking enforcement officers looking for violators there.
“It is the nature of parking enforcement,” Department of Transportation Services Director David Allen said. He said he did not know why there are large differences in the number of September tickets this year versus last year in any particular lot.
Lot 11B had just 31 tickets from the end of August to the end of September last year but 194 for the same time period this year.
According to Allen, the number of tickets in any given lot “just depends on where the enforcement officers go,” and where they go is sometimes entirely up to them.
On most days, Allen said, enforcers are assigned particular areas of the campus to patrol, such as North Campus lots or lots near Comcast Center.
But sometimes, a ticket enforcement officer is free to roam the campus, looking for a parking lot that no one else is already working on, Allen said. Therefore, the difference between a large ticketing month for Lot 11B and a slow one could just be a parking enforcer who made the trip over to the lot, found it to have a high number of violations and made it a habit to return.
In addition to Lot 11B, Lot 1B also saw a large increase in ticketing: 237 percent more tickets this year than last, increasing from 65 to 219.
Ticketing in parking garages also changed significantly. Lot 6, located next to Comcast Center, had only four tickets in that month of 2009, but 141 in 2010. Stadium Drive Parking Garage, on the other hand, saw a 66 percent decrease in the number of tickets this year from 213 in 2009 to 66 this September.
While parking enforcement is not random, because the enforcers have a say in where they go, it’s difficult to guess where they might be.
But junior criminology and criminal justice major Stephen Shaffer said he thinks ticketing is more or less random.
“You can park for five minutes and have a ticket or park for an hour and not have one,” he said, adding he once got a ticket outside of Cole Field House after being parked there for 10 minutes.
Junior government and politics and history major Jordan Weiss said, based on his experience, he thinks DOTS targets pay lots the most, such as Union Lane Parking Garage, where he parked Sunday.
Allen confirmed that metered spots are the most highly ticketed on the campus and said enforcers also know lots near dorms are common violation sites and often check there.
Junior English and marketing major Tom Seymour was not surprised to hear parking enforcers don’t always work on a particular schedule but was unhappy to know there’s little way of predicting when a parking attendant was coming to a certain spot.
“That’s the worst,” he said.
mccarty at umdbk dot com
