560 More Students, No More Spaces : Rising CSUN Enrollment Adds Up to Bigger Parking Crunch

Once they find a place to park, 27,715 full- and part-time students are to begin classes today at California State University, Northridge.

This year’s enrollment represents an increase of 560 students over a year ago, said a spokeswoman for the Office of Admissions.

The university’s enrollment has increased steadily since the school opened as San Fernando Valley State College in 1958 with 3,300 students.

However, the availability of parking has not kept pace, with each year producing an ever-greater parking crunch, said Sgt. Robert Daniero, the campus police parking enforcement chief.

The number of parking spots available to students has varied only slightly in recent years from its current 5,800, said Daniero, a 15-year-veteran with the campus force.

As a result, Daniero said, growing numbers of students “come close to panic when they can’t find a place to park.”

Freshmen, who assume that their $33.75-per-semester parking fee (up from $22.50 last year) assures them a space, are the most likely to become “anxious and disoriented when they arrive for a morning class and find all 12 student lots full,” Daniero said.

“Some will just sit there inside a lot or on the street outside for up to an hour.”

The university sells parking passes to anyone who requests them, regardless of the availability of spaces, figuring that the scarcity of spaces only occurs in the morning and does not affect students with classes only in the afternoons or evenings.

Although the first few days are the worst, Daniero said the parking crunch does not begin to significantly lessen until three or four weeks after school starts.

By that time, a flood of citations by campus police reduces the number of drivers without the required decal who park in student lots.

He said that by the fourth week of school, police are issuing a daily average of 300 parking citations, each carrying an $18 fine.

By mid-semester, the rate has dropped to 100 a day.

Daniero estimated the campus would need 2,500 more student parking spaces to meet anticipated demand.

He said that a 1,200-space lot scheduled to be built within a year “will help, but won’t solve all the problems.”