Flunking Parking 101

The odds of getting admitted to UC Irvine are better than the chances of getting reserved parking there. At UC Berkeley, the only way to get a free parking space is to win a Nobel Prize. Nearly 3,000 students were on the waiting list for parking at UCLA this quarter.

As college enrollments swell and lack of dorm space forces many to commute, parking has become as much a campus preoccupation as choosing a major. Student commuters wait in line an hour for a spot at some campuses. Others show up two hours before class to beat the rush.

“It’s like Christmastime when you’re shopping at South Coast Plaza,” said Cal State Fullerton senior Amie Mitchell of Irvine.

Getting an early start on their lives as car-bound Californians, these youthful academics resist all efforts to pry them from behind the steering wheel. They spurn the colleges’ free shuttles from distant spots, subsidized bus fares and special deals for carpoolers.

Many would rather idle their motors waiting for a prime space than walk an extra 15 minutes from an uncrowded lot a few blocks away.

“I’m spoiled,” confessed UCI junior Negar Shekarabi as she waited for a space in her blue 2001 Volkswagen Jetta. “I grew up in Orange County. I don’t walk to school.”

Students show up late to class. Professors miss meetings. Disputes over a precious space erupt into campus fisticuffs.

“It creates all kinds of anger,” said Nadesan Permaul, director of transportation at UC Berkeley.

At UC Berkeley, even the campus president pays for parking. On the other hand, Nobel laureates park free.

Shortly after economics professor Daniel McFadden shared a Nobel last year, he received a standing ovation as he was introduced at the halftime of a Cal football game.

Which was better, the adulation of 50,000 people or the parking space?

“Well, the parking space goes on and on,” he deadpanned. “It’s considered slightly more important than the prize, itself.”

At Cal State Northridge, temporary buildings and construction equipment to repair damage from the 1994 earthquake have hogged hundreds of spaces for seven years, making things even worse than usual.

The university has 7,000 parking spaces and 27,000 students, mostly commuters.

“That’s as big as some of the towns around my hometown,” said Brandon Jackson, a sophomore from the Northern California town of Fairfield. “So it’s like trying to get a whole town to park in a four- or five-block area. You can’t do it.”

At UCI, students pay $81 per quarter for a parking pass, but that isn’t much more than a license to hunt. About 15,000 students, faculty and staff try to stuff themselves into 10,500 spaces throughout the day.

Most mornings, students ritualistically line up their cars along the three top floors of Parking Structure 4 in the center of campus, studying, listening to music or sleeping--hoping, pleading, someone quickly will emerge from the stairwell.

“Are you pulling out?” comes the desperate cry from the first car.

The wait deters few. “I live five minutes away, but it takes 10 to 20 minutes to find parking,” complained senior economics major Steven Chen.

Parking is hardly one of the insurmountable problems of higher education. Colleges could build more parking structures. Some do, like UCLA and UCI, temporarily creating even worse crunches as they close parking lots to put up garages. But many put a higher spending priority on more academic concerns such as buildings, library books and professors’ salaries.

Students could walk a few extra minutes from a more distant lot, take public transportation or bicycle. But asking that of a car-culture generation draws a startled response, as if you were asking them to do their term paper with a typewriter.

Mike Cornner, spokesman for Pierce College in Woodland Hills, calls it the 7-Eleven Theory: “[Students] think they should be able to pull up to the front door, get out, get what they want and jump back in the car. So they’re disappointed when it takes them a little longer.”

UCI freshman Linda Ragheb of Seal Beach has waited as long as an hour for a close-in parking space. “At the end of the day, I don’t want to walk back,” she said.

Is it laziness? “Oh, yeah.”

Shekarabi often shows up at UCI an hour before class to find a parking space. If she’s late, she parks in a restricted spot and pays the $30 ticket.

She’s not alone. Some students have gotten as many as 50 tickets a year, said Mike Delo, UCI’s director of parking and transportation.

Competing for Space

There’s one way to beat the crunch: a reserved UCI parking permit that guarantees an open space. They cost almost $50 more per quarter, but price isn’t the problem. About 3,000 students signed up when 400 reserved permits were offered in a lottery. That gave students a 13% chance of getting a reserved space at UCI compared with a 58% chance of being accepted there in the first place.

Even though Berkeley students pay $54 a month, the most expensive parking cost in the UC system, there still is a shortage of 4,100 parking spaces each day.

“We were here 50 years before major public transportation and the automobile,” said transportation director Permaul. “We’re a 19th-century campus in a 21st-century environment.”

Forget trying to park on the streets around campus. You’re either stuck with a meter or stuck period, because for two miles around campus you need a neighborhood parking permit.

Things aren’t much better at younger-sibling UCLA, where 14 football players pleaded guilty in 1999 to misdemeanors for using handicapped-parking placards.

“By 10 a.m., at the latest, we’re filled to capacity, every day,” said Mark Stocki, the school’s head of parking. “Not a space.”

About 60,000 people a day show up at UCLA, more than double the population of Laguna Beach, and they arrive in 25,000 automobiles.

In an effort to reduce the number of cars converging on Westwood, UCLA has arranged free rides for students on the Santa Monica bus lines, cheaper parking rates and guaranteed space for carpools and the largest fleet of vanpools of any university in the country, Stocki said.

Nevertheless, parking lots are jammed.

Reduced-rate parking at the nearby Veterans Administration and a shuttle to campus was abandoned about a decade ago for lack of use. “We didn’t have a single faculty or staff who would buy a permit there,” Stocki moaned.

Buses from the San Fernando Valley and South Central were similarly abandoned because of the dearth of riders.

Archrival USC boasts of a superior parking situation, thanks to 10,000 spaces on surface streets and lots at the Shrine, Coliseum and nearby museums.

“I have e-mails from kids who said they came to USC instead of UCLA because they could find a place to park,” said Brian d’Autremont, USC’s director of transportation services.

Fights Break Out

Cal State Long Beach is so crowded that for three days at the beginning of the fall semester, all 12,500 parking spaces on campus were filled. “We’re saturated in terms of supply and demand for the first month of the fall semester,” said Tom Bass, senior director, parking and transportation services.

In the past, that meant police were called to break up fights in the parking lots two or three times a semester. But that ended when the spaces were repainted with diagonal lines so it was obvious who had first dibs.

There were plenty of parking spaces last week--if students were willing to walk 15 minutes to class. Still, many circled the lots, hoping to get closer in, some out of laziness, others because they worried about walking back to their cars in the dark.

Some students, like junior Susan Miramontez, stop in the parking lanes and wait until a space comes open. The 42-year-old psychology major from Montebello sits in her car for a half hour and studies until someone pulls out. It’s become such a routine, she has a regular spot where she waits in her 1994 Honda Accord.

“I don’t like to walk that far,” she said.

Lynette Bui, a senior accounting major from Westminster, had circled the lot for 20 minutes seeking a space near her classes. She finally gave up and pulled over to wait for someone to leave.

Stalled in Last Place

A 1999 survey of students at California State University campuses rated parking last in quality among campus services. Making parking easier is the most important thing the CSU system could do to help students reach their academic goals, the students said.

Cal State campuses in Fullerton and San Marcos have resorted to a sort of free valet parking to wedge more cars into the same parking acreage.

“We don’t refer to it as valet parking,” corrected Dora Knoblock, director of parking at San Marcos. “We call it stack parking.”

Whatever. Students drive up, are directed to a spot in an aisle, give their keys to an attendant, and are handed a claim check. It’s almost like going to an expensive restaurant, except you don’t have to tip. And it has enabled an extra 400 cars to squeeze onto Cal State Fullerton, which hires the pros from Ampco System Parking for the job.

The stack parking lot is filled by 8:30 a.m., and some students show up at school two hours before their first class to get a decent space. They could show up much later to find one a 10-minute walk away.

“I didn’t want to walk that far,” said sophomore E.J. Nepomuceno of West Covina.

Senior Jessica Maloney of Brea said she recently circled the Fullerton campus lot for two hours in her gas-guzzling Chevy Silverado searching for a space. As the time for class approached, her desperation grew. “I saw a [young woman] walking,” she recalled. “I said, ‘Five dollars for your space--please.’ ”

The young woman took it.

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Times staff writer Zanto Peabody contributed to this report.