Parking spaces coveted on campuses
Laura Martinez
reporter

  The hot topic on any Tarrant County College campus? Forget affirmative action, academic freedom or grade inflation. What really heats up students (and faculty) these days is trying to find a good parking spot.
For the first week, TCC police handed out numerous warnings for vehicles parked in faculty/staff spots. Thus, TCC employees found it difficult to park in spaces allotted to them.
Now that the grace period is over, those warnings are turning into citations. But the problem does not stop in the yellow-striped faculty/staff area. Police can issue tickets to students parking in visitor parking areas, pulling through angled spots (which creates a safety hazard when pulling out into one-way traffic) and not displaying a current parking permit.
With more and more students bringing individual cars to campus, students are also getting parking violations resulting from not enough parking spaces. TCC collects about a thousand dollars toward general funds from fines, but the campus police do not consider those fees “easy money.”
“We must also deal with traffic congestion during the peak hours of 8-10 in the morning and 4-5:30 in the evening,“ Lt. Grady Patterson, SE Campus police department, said.
When Aaron Smith, a 20-year-old education major, parked in a reserved faculty spot on his first day of classes, he received a ticket.
“Anybody will tell you that parking is the No. 1 problem students talk about. But it’s also the No. 1 issue that’s hardest to deal with and the hardest to find solutions for,” he said.
The problem, according to TCC officials, is a matter of supply and demand: too many cars and not enough spaces. The police department on SE Campus, for instance, issued nearly 8,000 student parking permits this past semester for about 2,000 spaces. These permits are good for two years and cost nothing.
Patterson said the newly opened Lot C on SE created more parking on the back side of the school, which helped relieve some previous parking discomfort.
“Here at school we are given a parking permit that we basically consider a license to hunt,” Luke Strong, student, said. “Register your car, and if you can find a legal space by that permit designation, you can park there.”
Matt Collins, a 19-year-old history major, joked that when a student walks into a parking lot, a car usually follows the student—not to make a pass or harass, but to get a spot that is close to the building.
“That tells you how crazy it [the parking situation] is,” he said.
One solution to ease the crunch is simply adding more spaces to keep up with the increase in enrollment, which on the SE Campus has grown about 40 percent since the school opened in 1996.
However, adding parking spaces is not always cost efficient, especially if open land is at a premium and schools have to build up. According to Bill Watson, sales representative for TXI Concrete, a space in a new multileveled parking garage costs $13,000 to build and maintain, compared to a cost of $2,000 per space in a conventional parking lot.
Across all TCC campuses, students who ignore parking tickets put their work in the classroom at risk. Parking penalties put a hold on student accounts; therefore, they may not register for classes or obtain official transcripts until they make good on their debt to the business office.
Matt Zimmerman said thanks to some good excuses and a compassionate parking appeals court, nearly half of the 10 parking violations he has racked up on South Campus have been dismissed.
Even though parking on the Tarrant County College campuses is not that problematic in comparison to other colleges, the situation still plagues students who are always rushing to class and wish they could park closer or find a better spot near their building without having to worry about receiving a ticket.
“Never having a good place to park has become a fact of life on campus,” student Lacey Deter said.