Parking. It’s the ever-present struggle on university campuses. From parking garages to lots, students always have something to complain about.
One thing that frustrates students is that even with the different parking options available, there aren’t enough spots for the number of students who attend.
“I think FGCU has a whole 10 parking spots for 100,000 students,” junior Holden Caldwell said.
Another common concern for students not only deals with the lack of spots, but the crowding of garages, making it hard to come in and out.
“I’ve noticed that oftentimes when I try to leave during a certain time, the areas on certain levels get crammed quite a lot, and it becomes difficult to get out. And I just don’t know why,” student Gabriella Duran said.
This could sometimes cause students to be late for class.
“I have been late to class several times because I had to go from one place to another place because I thought there would be parking and there wasn’t,” senior Lia Smith said. “From when I leave my house to when I get to class, sometimes it takes me, like, 30 minutes, sometimes it takes me an hour.”
Recently, parking services implemented new digital signs on all parking garages that display how many spots are available in that garage as cars filter in and out.
“We implemented this system to help drivers save time instead of searching for spaces and allow them to look for other parking places on campus in a more timely fashion,” James Welch, the Assistant Director of Parking Services for FGCU, said. “This will help alleviate congestion of searching for a parking space.”
The system was modeled after other universities, hospitals and national parks that put this same system in place and were successful. According to Welch, it took about two months of planning and cost approximately $73,000 to install.
“Baylor University installed this system on some garages, and it was so successful that Student Government raised funds to add more,” Welch said.
Parking signs weren’t the only things that changed in the parking garages over the last month. Speed humps were also added to the entrance of the garages to account for the accuracy of vehicles entering and exiting.
“They provide the count of every car that enters the garage and deducts every car that exits the garage,” Welch said. “This allows for high efficiency because the vehicle is counted before it even makes it to a parking space.”
However, students at FGCU haven’t really noticed a change in the parking situation due to these signs. Some doubt that the system is accurate but Welch disproves these comments.
“We input the total number of spaces into the system for each garage. The system has a 97% accuracy rating which is very high for the parking industry,” he said.
To ensure the signs stay accurate and help as many students as possible navigate the parking problem, parking services will count space availability in the coming weeks in each garage to make sure it is tracking correctly and functioning properly. They will then add live data of the space counts to the parking services page on the FGCU website.
