Donald Keough, Editor-in-Chief
Following the creation of the First-Year Quad (FYQ), many students found it difficult to find parking.
To combat this, a new system is being implemented by Campus Safety for the next academic year. Parking permits will no longer be granted equally across class years; instead, permits will be assigned to seniors, then juniors, and so on.
Each student within each class will receive a random parking selection window based on a random lottery system. During this window, students will have the choice of selecting between five permit areas: Silverstein lot, West/South campus, North campus, East Campus (including the lot behind Mitchell by the Heat Plant) and Remote Parking at the Ebaugh lot and at the lot across from Kappa Sigma.
Each permit area has limited availability, and once an area is sold out, students will no longer be able to select that location when their selection window occurs.
This process differs for first-year students, who will select permits in July after returning student selection has finished. Students who are abroad next semester will also have an alternate opportunity for parking permits in November.
Any student who misses their respective window will have to select from leftover parking permits, and will “likely be limited to remote parking,” according to David Rose, the director of Campus Safety, in an email to the student body on Feb. 26.
The formal process involves three steps. Returning students first indicate that they are bringing a car on campus after filling out their Housing Application, which opened on March 2. Those who indicated that they will be bringing a car to campus will be notified of their parking selection window, and this window will be sometime before July 1. After selecting their spot, students will receive an email link to register their permit, which will likely also be sent on July 1.
The new parking system was announced to the Denison Campus Governance Association (DCGA) on Feb. 24. Rose said to the students in attendance that if he “could put a space outside of your residence hall with your name on it, I would.”
“Parking should not be a distraction for you,” Rose said. “It should not be something that upsets you every time you get out of your car. I know that’s probably been the case for some of you this year. So we’re doing the best we can to try to get closer to something that works well for everybody.”
The new system is expected to provide enough permits for all students. Although Rose said there was some concern that parking would sell out last semester, he said that the new system doesn’t have a limit on the number of students who can sign up for the lottery.
“I can tell you with as close to 100% certainty as I can get that all returning students get parking spaces,” Rose said.
Much of the student feedback was heard directly by Rose, as he said that throughout this academic year he has and will continue to meet with students interested in raising concerns about parking.
“It doesn’t automatically make sense why there’s such a shortage of parking,” Rose said. “But when you situate in context, that it has to work for visitors, staff, faculty and students, then it tends to make more sense.”
The Red Frame Lab, which provides professional development opportunities for students, has been working on a project which aims to gauge student feedback and provide an analysis that could help improve the current system.
This project didn’t have any influence on the new system’s creation or implementation, but they hope that the information they’ve gathered from students will help improve upon this system in the future.
So far, they’ve had a number of findings. Carl Headen ‘26, one of the students working on the project, said that their initial survey which gauged roughly 70 students found that many harshly criticized the current system.
“A lot of people hate parking right now,” Headen said.
There were a number of reasons, Headen said, that students felt this way. Although the convenience of location was one of these reasons, some students also said that they thought the cost of parking was too high, and that they “would be willing to park in a less convenient area” if they got to pay less, according to Headen. He also said that the opposite was also true.
Additionally, the survey also found that many students were frustrated with parking tickets they received.
“A lot of things that were said on the survey were like, ‘I got a parking ticket for something that I had no idea about,’” Headen said.
Some of these alternative reasons for student sentiment plan to be presented to Campus Safety at the end of the semester.
“Hopefully we can give [them] some ideas, and hopefully [they’ll] take them into mind and change some things about the current solution.”
Rose said that Campus Safety is always open to comments or concerns students have.
“It’s really important to me that parking is not a distraction for students,” Rose said. “We want people to be satisfied with their experience here, and we don’t want anything that causes students to be upset.”