For Mariel Mallari, a second-year student living off-campus, her commute is spent circling campus in hopes of finding parking.
Thirty-two parking stalls designated for M-permit holders were lost as a result of a change made in May, switching Lot 6 to paid hourly parking. For $236.88 per semester, the M-permit allows holders to park in any M-designated lot on campus, but some students who can’t find spots in the lots they’re paying to use are turning to metered parking.
“I have to leave my house an hour early to find a good parking spot, or even just a parking spot in general,” said Mallari. “Every time I have to end up parking in Lot 6 which is pay to park, or Lot 10, which is also Pay to Park.”
Clayton Brooks, Parking Service’s assistant manager of operations, said “32 stalls were lost in the switchover, it’s not enough to affect anything.”
Paid parking costs $2.00 per hour, and a 2022 article written by the Carillon found that M-permits worked out to $2.87 per day based on a 20-day work month.
“Paying more than I pay for the parking pass in Pay to Park alone is so crazy,” said Mallari. “I think paying $200 for a parking pass that you can’t even use every day because most of the parking is full is stupid.”
In 2011, Global News Regina reported that the U of R oversold parking passes by 25 per cent, selling 6,250 passes despite having a 5,000-stall capacity.
When asked how many M stalls are on campus, Brooks said “I don’t know that number off the top of my head.” He refused to provide the number of passes sold, saying “I can’t give you that number.”
It is not uncommon for parking passes to be oversold at universities, as it is presumed that pass holders will be on campus at different times.
For one Kīšik resident, however, there seems to be too many open spots.
“I always see like every day, the parking lot is half empty all the time,” said the resident. “My friends have parking passes for the underground parking lot below Kīšik and whenever I’m in there, it’s always half empty too.”
Much like students seeking to buy an M-pass, this resident was told to join a wait list. The only available option was in Lot 1, across campus from Kīšik.
The resident, frustrated, decided to ask Parking Services about the issue. “I can see the parking lot is always half empty, and she goes, ‘Well, we don’t rent out all of the parking spaces so that we don’t fill up maximum capacity for safety reasons.’”
With nowhere else to park their car, the resident has been forced to use Pay to Park every day.
“I’ve had to wake up before eight o’clock every morning to pay around $20 a day to park my car in the dorm parking lot,” said the resident.
“If it is true that they only rent out half of the resident parking for maximum capacity safety reasons … it’s also another way for them to force people into paying daily, and it’s like, significantly more expensive.”
