Students cramming late at night for their final exams this semester will be able to park near popular study areas around the campus as a result of a new DOTS initiative.
The Department of Transportation Services plans to offer special overnight parking permits that officials hope will help prevent students from having to make long trips to their cars late at night. The permits, which will be valid from May 12 to May 20, will be usable from 6 p.m. to 7 a.m., DOTS Director David Allen said.
Nearly 80 spots will be made available for the program, including several near McKeldin Library and the engineering building. The permits, which will be available in the DOTS office starting May 7, are free for students who already have parking permits and will cost $30 for everyone else for the week.
Gabi Band, the Greek legislator for the Student Government Association who came up with the idea while trying to find places to study late at night, said the program would make studying safer for students.
“In my freshman, sophomore, junior years, I’d need to drive to some place quiet to study,” Band said. “I’d have to park somewhere farther away, and then I’d leave at like 4 [a.m.] and I’d have to walk to my car.”
Band said he saw the program as a low-cost strategy to help make the campus safer.
“Yes, the best thing to do would be to put more police on the street,” he said. “But there are a lot of small programs like this that you can implement to deal with crime.”
To gather data for the permit, the SGA set up shop earlier this month in the Stamp Student Union, armed with thumbtacks and a large map of the campus. More than 200 students stuck thumbtacks into the map indicating where they prefer to study, SGA Senior Vice President Joanna Calabrese said.
As expected, many chose McKeldin Library, but other popular spots included the Engineering and Physical Sciences Library and Van Munching Hall, Calabrese said. One student even chose the Shuttle-UM building.
The SGA then took that data to Allen, who said they chose what areas to include in the program based on the map and their own data which indicated which parking lots generally had overnight vacancies.
Calabrese said it would be “a problem” if everyone clamored for the spots in the lots near McKeldin, but that the program would also “incentivize people to study in other libraries” by giving them spots near those buildings.
Under the plan, spaces from eight parking lots on the campus will be made available: three in Lot W1 and 25 in Lot Y, which is near Skinner Hall; two in Lot S4, which is beside Susquehanna Hall; 14 in Lot T, which is beside the engineering building; five in Lot MM2, which is next to the Cambridge Community; 19 in Lot A and four in Lot D, which are near Worcester Hall; and six in Lot U6, which is beside Mowatt Lane Parking Garage.
Allen said he considered the permit program a pilot and that it could be tweaked in the future. Band said he hoped the program would continue to expand.
“My ultimate goal in the future is that this could be applied to weeknight studying or midterm studying,” Band said.
Junior criminology major Ashlea McDonald, who lives in University View and stuck a thumbtack on the SGA’s map, said she would be interested in participating in the program.
She said she would “absolutely [use the permit], because the Blue Bus takes like four hours [and] Lot 1 is so far from the library.”
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