Category Archives: Parking

Parking changes for fall: more, shuttles, busses

Posted on August 20, 2011 by | 2 Comments

Walter Kraft sent around an email the other day announcing changes to parking on campus for fall 2011:

When students, faculty and staff return to classes on August 31 there will be some changes in parking and transportation, including a new park free option/free shuttle bus at the Rynearson Stadium Park & Ride Lot on Hewitt Road and increased parking rates for most users of main campus lots. These are the first parking rate increases in six years.

Other plans include changes to lot configurations, automated payment systems in paid lots, a new handicapped parking verification process, and a new discounted bus pass opportunity for all students, faculty and staff for unlimited rides through a new partnership with AATA’s TheRide. The new plans are designed to help address increased congestion and parking challenges on campus.

Complete details about the plans can be found at www.emich.edu/parking_information/ or by contacting the Parking Department at 734.487.3450 or via the web at www.emich.edu/parking.

Basically, the cost of a parking hunting license hang tag  is going up, they’re going to be attempting a shuttle service so you can park by the football stadium (which is something they’ve tried before and it has never worked out well); and there’s a pretty good deal on discounted 30 day unlimited bus pass with TheRide.  A few thoughts in no particular order:

  • It’s not exactly surprising that they raised the cost of parking, and while I know people will complain, parking at EMU is still pretty dang cheap compared to other universities.
  • The main thing that bothers me about parking at EMU is there’s not enough enforcement of the rules.  I’ve seen lots of people parking in places where they shouldn’t, either because of the wrong tag or no tag at all.  And yes, they give out tickets, but I’d frankly like to see more towing.
  • There’s no way that shuttle service to and from the football stadium is going to work.
  • If I lived in Ypsi-Arbor but far enough from campus to have to drive, I’d probably think about getting one of those bus passes.  $30 a month for unlimited bus travel seems like a pretty good deal to me.
  • And in case you were wondering, here’s the sitedad school of thought/tactics on parking:
    • Don’t drive to campus if you can help it. Walk or bike in.  (And I realize that most people don’t live within walking or even biking distance, but still).
    • The first two weeks of the new school year are always the absolute craziest of the year when it comes to parking. So patience, grasshopper, and realize it will get a little easier.
    • Plan ahead, people, and future students of mine:  if you get to campus 10 minutes before class begins, you are almost certainly setting yourself for being late.
    • Things might change next year, but I can almost always find a spot in the north lot, the one labeled “I” in this map.  Yes, it requires a walk, but I’d rather spend 15 minutes walking to where it is I need to go instead of spending 3o minutes not finding a spot and then coming back here to park and then being late anyway.  There are other spots where I have good parking lot, but some things will remain my own little secret.
    • If all else fails and/or someone is on a budget, you might want to pass on the parking pass entirely and consider parking in one of the neighborhoods west of campus.  I live about a mile from Pray-Harrold, a pleasant enough walk, and one could park on my street all day long if they wanted.

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Posted in Buildings and Grounds, Parking

Is there anyone out there who can explain the Bowen parking lot to me?

Posted on August 16, 2011 by | 14 Comments

I am on campus today for the first day in a while, and I noticed that the Bowen parking lot is being reconstructed in some interestingly different ways.  It’s kind of hard to describe and I don’t have a decent picture, but it looks like it is going to be come a kind of two-level lot with some green space in between.  One way or the other, it looks like the lot will have significantly fewer spaces, which bums me out since I often enough find parking here.

What gives?  Anyone know?

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Posted in Buildings and Grounds, Parking

The parking lot shuffle

Posted on May 2, 2011 by | 7 Comments

EMU-AAUP President Susan Moeller sent around an email last night about the proposed (or just “done?” this isn’t entirely clear, though there was apparently no input from the EMU committee on parking) changes in parking on campus for the summer and beyond.  Here is a link to the PDF of the chart that summarizes the changes on the EMU-AAUP web site, and, if you are like me and you haven’t memorized the names and locations of all parking on campus, here’s a link to a PDF campus map that includes the names and locations of parking lots.  The biggest change and the one that Moeller focuses on in her email is to make Bowman-Roosevelt (the parking lot(s) closest to Pray-Harrold and Porter) into a reserved parking lot by day, meaning to park there would cost faculty/staff $480 a year.

Now, I live about a mile from campus, and while even being that close I still drive on a fairly regular basis (especially if I am coming from or going to campus to go off and do something else around town that requires a car), parking is not as big of a deal to me as it is to people who have to drive a great distance every day. Often, I don’t bother to “hunt” for a spot and I just head directly to the big lot on the north side of campus.  Also often, if I’m in a hurry and/or am feeling lazy, I’ll pay to park in a guest lot.  And if I don’t have some place to be immediately before or after work on campus and/or I’m feeling a little more energetic, I walk or ride my bike.

So with that in mind, a couple of my thoughts on these parking plans:

  • It helps explain the repaving of Bowen.  I agree with my colleagues and still think it’s a waste of money in very tight financial times, but now I at least can guess why the suits want to repave this lot.
  • I am torn about the Bowman-Roosevelt lot converting to a reserved parking lot.  First off, this makes me sad because it would mean I wouldn’t be able to park there by day, and sometimes, if I get there early enough or if I get lucky, I do get a spot in that lot.  Second, the by day part of things is problematic. I think what that means is that they aren’t going to have some sort of gate blocking the entrance to the lot and just enforce it with tags of some sort, which is different from the other reserved parking lots on campus.  As it is/was, students and other people who aren’t supposed to park in this lot did so all the time, and I’ve never seen an illegally parked car towed out of there.  So if I were to pay almost $500 a year for a parking spot and then showed up to work needing to be someplace five minutes after I arrived only to find some knucklehead parked in my spot, I would not be amused.
  • That said, if I did commute a significant distance to campus and I did most of my work on campus, I probably would buy one of these spots.  And I’m pretty sure that one of the reasons why the parking people/suits are enacting these plans is because there is a high demand from faculty and staff for these reserved spots.  When these reserved spots first became available, one of my colleagues who commutes from Detroit immediately purchased a spot.  I asked him how much they were and he said “I don’t care,” suggesting that EMU probably could have charged him a heck of a lot more than they do.
  • Compared to many other campuses, parking at EMU is not that bad of a deal.  It’s part of the bennies for faculty, and it’s comparably cheap for everyone else.  There are many campuses in this country where parking is thousands– not hundreds– of dollars every year.

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Posted in Buildings and Grounds, EMU-AAUP, Parking

“EMU officials tweak Washtenaw-Oakwood construction plan, but some residents still unhappy”

Posted on February 9, 2011 by | 5 Comments

From annarbor.com, “EMU officials tweak Washtenaw-Oakwood construction plan, but some residents still unhappy.” Commuters coming to EMU down Washtenaw from points west of campus know this intersection well and certainly appreciate the need for some attention here.  Though I do want to highlight an issue that comes up later in the article:

The project failed to receive the planning commission’s support in November, and its opponents have questioned why EMU wasn’t first addressing the Huron River Drive and Oakwood intersection. That intersection sees more accidents and some officials say tackling problems there could alleviate congestion at the Oakwood corridor’s south end.

Some residents and planning commissioners also argued that the university should have planned to improve the entire Oakwood corridor while it was investing more than $200 million in capital improvement projects in recent years. Those projects have heavily increased traffic along Oakwood Street, which borders the campus’s west side.

This is a good point, assuming “recent years” means the last dozen or so years.  Halle Library and the Student Center has shifted the “center” of campus, and I think this has resulted in some significant changes in the way that Oakwood between Washtenaw and Huron is used, something I am experiencing first-hand while being in “exile” in Hoyt Hall.  I’m not traffic design expert, but perhaps EMU and Ypsilanti should come together to give this area a little more attention, too.

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Posted in Buildings and Grounds, In the media..., Parking, Ypsilanti

WCC rents some EMU parking spaces

Posted on December 13, 2009 by | 9 Comments

From the Washtenaw Voice comes this news, “WCC offers shuttle from Eastern to ease parking.” Here are the opening paragraphs:

In order to free up parking spots on campus for the Winter 2010 semester, Washtenaw Community College will rent the parking lot located across the street from Rynearson Stadium at Eastern Michigan University, at a cost of $100,050.

Just south of Huron River Drive on Hewitt, and a little over a mile from WCC, the lot will allow more than 1,000 drivers the opportunity to park quickly, and immediately be shuttled to the front of the WCC Student Center building.

Two free shuttle buses will transport students, faculty and staff from the Rynearson lot — and back — beginning at 6:45 a.m. until 6:15 p.m., Monday through Thursday, beginning Jan. 11. The college is working with a number of vendors to possibly have “beverages, coffee and hot drinks” available to participants, according to Vice President of Administration and Finance Steven Hardy.

I don’t have a lot to do with WCC, so I guess this is kind of a naive question: is parking there really that bad?

And I also don’t know how much it typically costs to rent a large parking lot, but $100K? Really? For space that EMU really wouldn’t be using otherwise?

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Posted in In the media..., Parking, Washtenaw Community College

Imaginary crime fighter

Posted on October 9, 2009 by | 3 Comments

I saw an announcement about this from EMU DPS the other day, but here’s the article in annarbor.com: “Eastern Michigan University student’s carjacking claim was fabricated, police say.” Basically, the student who claimed there was someone in her car who she punched out in order escape made the whole thing up. Why? I haven’t a clue.

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Posted in In the media..., Parking, Security and Safety

Dear woman who rudely cut me off in the student center parking lot because “I have to go to work:”

Posted on April 8, 2009 by | 11 Comments

I hope you got my note.

I was the guy pulling into a spot in the EMU Student Center parking lot this afternoon, fair and square, when you cut me off by going the wrong way and took it. My jaw appropriately dropped onto the steering wheel, I pulled up next to you, rolled down the window, and asked “are you serious?!” To which you got out of your car and announced “I have to go to work.”

Hey, we all have our bad days. Lord knows I have mine, and maybe you were having one of yours. I followed you in to see where you were working, but I’ll leave out what door I saw you go into. But I believe you were going to work. I understand. I too was going to work and I too was on a tight schedule, which is why I was parking in the guest lot. I was at the Student Center to meet some of my students and to go to the annual first year writing program’s “celebration of student writing.” But I don’t know, maybe it was more important for you to take the spot I was pulling into for some reason.

I thought what you did was super rude, but I don’t really care that much that you were rude to me. Like I said, I work here too, so being rude to me is not really that big of a deal– well, other than the fact that it’s not a good thing for co-workers to be rude to each other.

No, what I really care about is who you could have been rude to. See, this was in the guest parking lot at the EMU Student Center. I’m pretty sure that most (at least many) of the people who park in the Student Center guest parking lot are guests at EMU, and being rude to guests is never cool.

I mean, what if you had pulled this stunt with someone visiting EMU who was thinking about coming here in the Fall? What if it was a parent? What if it was an alum coming back to visit the new Student Center? What if it was one of the hundreds of people who had come to the ballroom for today’s “celebration of student writing?” Heck, what if it was someone who was interested in donating money to EMU? That wouldn’t be, good would it?

Anyway. No harm this time, but could you do me a favor and think a little more about this sort of thing next time? We’ve got enough image problems at EMU without trying to cut off potential guests to the school just in the name of a parking spot. Thanks for thinking and thanks for reading,

–Steve (aka, sitedad)

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Posted in Administrator Life, Buildings and Grounds, EMU Branding, EMU Events, EMU Fund Raising, EMU Images, Parking, Staff Life, Student Life

“Unfit for students” (or, parking woes at WCC)

Posted on March 3, 2009 by | 1 Comment

This is a little off-topic, but it came up in my Eastern Michigan University Google feed today: “Unfit for students: College prohibiting students from parking in Fitness Center lot,” from the Washtenaw Voice (which I presume is the student paper at Washtenaw Community College). A snippet to explain what this is all about:

If you’re a Washtenaw Community College student and you don’t have a pricey membership to the Fitness Center, then don’t even think about trying to park there.

The WCC administration and the management company that runs the Health and Fitness Center want parking at the facility to be member excusive, barring most students from
the lot.

“If you want to go over there just to park, well, that’s inappropriate,” said Larry Whitworth, president of WCC.

How did EMU come up with this? Here:

While [former WCC Board of Trustees member Richard] Bailey said he can understand that members of the Fitness Center need to be able to park there, he also believes that the college should utilize all the parking it has so that it doesn’t have to build a parking structure or go to a system like that at the University of Michigan or Eastern Michigan University, where students must purchase a parking sticker.

So while it’s tough to find a place to part at WCC, at least it’s free.

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Posted in In the media..., Parking, Washtenaw Community College

You think YOU have got parking problems….

Posted on February 27, 2009 by | 1 Comment

From the Chronicle of Higher Education “blog” of sorts: “Kent State U. Dean Resigns After Police Say She Defaced a Parking Sign.”

When the dean of Kent State University’s Stark campus resigned abruptly last week, a press release issued by the university, in Canton, Ohio, said she was leaving for personal reasons.

But according to local news reports, the dean, Betsy V. Boze, actually resigned after a police report identified her as the vandal who earlier last week used a can of spray paint to alter a parking sign at nearby Stark State College. No charges have been filed in the case.

This article and a related one linked to in the CHE piece from a Canton newspaper say that Boze’s excuse was that she was merely “correcting” a sign, and the Canton paper has a picture of the sign in question.

This probably isn’t the best way of handling parking problems of course, but I can actually sympathize with ex-dean Boze a bit. I have more than once been tempted to erect some sort of homemade sign at the entrance of the Pray-Harrold parking lot to remind would-be student parkers that this was a faculty/staff lot during the day. So obviously, it was a stupid move on Boze’s part, but I at least admire her follow-through.

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Posted in Administrator Life, College Fun, In the media..., Parking

Parking updates in Ann Arbor; wouldn’t it be cool if we could do something like this at EMU?

Posted on April 23, 2008 by | 6 Comments

I’m trying to catch up on some Google Reader RSS feed reading this evening (more final project reading and grading tomorrow), and I came across this site, which shows real time availability of parking spots in lots in downtown Ann Arbor. I found this via the blog TheOrangeSlayedTheRake.

Now, this works because these are all pay lots, and Republic Parking is making money/has the resources to make something like this work. But if there was a way to make something like this work at EMU, it’d be cool….

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Posted in Parking