If you look around at the bike racks in front of your dorm, classes, or dining halls, you’ll find at least a few rusty, long-forgotten bicycles, but it’s not just bikes!
A few cars on campus are abandoned, which is even more confusing because, unlike the bikes, those cars take up ever-elusive FSU parking spots — the same spots students pay $300 a semester to use overnight! With that figure in mind, FSU has a prima facie monetary incentive to get those abandoned cars removed so it can sell more parking passes.
Abandoned Cars
Solving the puzzle of why FSU has abandoned bikes starts with figuring out why FSU has abandoned cars; unlike the bikes, cars take up a limited resource that FSU has an obvious financial motive to retain. That incentive is made clear every Friday before a home football game when FSU sends communications instructing students to remove their cars from booster lots lest their vehicles be towed.
Trust me, they will tow your car if you don’t move it from a Seminole Booster lot the night before a game. In fact (and I encourage you to go out and see for yourself the next home game), some of the more desirable lots have tow trucks waiting at 11:59 p.m. for midnight to strike so they can remove cars.
Not only that, but the Booster lot stipulation is also included in the conditions of overnight parking passes. So, if FSU can tow a car at the turn of a dime before game nights, why are there abandoned cars where a similar (or even less urgent) incentive exists?
This booster exception leads us back to FSU and Florida’s abandoned vehicle law. It seems counterintuitive, but there is a different and more stringent standard for removing abandoned cars instead of active cars that park illegally.
Looking just at page 13 of FSU’s parking regulations, there’s no technical distinction between what the school has to do with an active car and an abandoned one. The real difference comes from Florida’s law regarding abandoned motor vehicles on private property.
Abandoned cars must meet at least one of the conditions listed by the state to be considered abandoned on private property, such as having expired tags or having a defect, making it inoperable for over 72 hours. One of these conditions being met makes a car abandoned and differentiates it from the active vehicles parked illegally in Booster lots.
This differentiation is important to acknowledge because abandoned vehicles burden the private property owner instead of the vehicle owner. With the Booster lot violations, those cars have easily attributable owners. They can, therefore, take on the towing fee, not to mention that the owners are incentivized because they want to reclaim their car.
If you look closely at the abandoned cars, they all have tickets on them, some dating back for years. Why is this? FSU is not required to keep posting notices after five days of the vehicle owner receiving a notification through certified mail. It seems like removing the car after that requirement is met would make more sense, but that isn’t so.
If the owner doesn’t do anything about the notification or can’t be contacted, then FSU can’t pass on the cost of towing to the owner; that then places the financial burden on either FSU or (more likely) the towing company.
Towing companies can make their money back by selling the vehicle if, after 35 days, the car is not recuperated, but it’s much harder to sell a dilapidated, abandoned car than a new one. This means FSU or the towing company has no real financial incentive, making for many untouched, abandoned cars.
Abandoned Bicycles
Although different from automobiles, abandoned bikes fall under much the same scrutiny as abandoned cars. Bikes are not considered Class A vehicles because they weigh less than 10,000 pounds and, therefore, do not face the exact legal requirements as abandoned cars for removal.
Bikes, however, can still be considered abandoned property. Since bikes (generally) are worth less than $500, FSU is within its rights to remove them after a notification is sent to the owner. The problem presents itself here; if you think it’s hard to contact the owner of an abandoned car with the tags registered with the state of Florida, imagine trying to do that with a bike.
Bikes need to meet less intensive registration requirements to be vehicles in Florida, so their owners are much more challenging to track down. FSU also has no internal record of who owns what bike. This gives them a lot of trouble trying to assign any removal burden for abandoned bikes because they don’t know who to assign it to.
What this looks like practically is close to what it looks like for cars: lots of notes are being placed on bikes stating that they will be removed soon. The problem is if you look at these tickets with dates of removal, many of those dates have come and passed.
It could be that FSU is not just meeting its legal requirement for notifying the owner; they’re also hoping that a person picks up the bike so they don’t have to deal with the burden of moving and impounding it (all of which costs money). While, in theory, these bikes could be auctioned off, most of the abandoned ones on campus are in such disarray they would need to be sold off for parts; that’s a much less tempting carrot for impounding services than an auction-ready bike.
What does all of this mean?
Although, at first blush, it seems like FSU is being irresponsible with all these stray, abandoned vehicles, they’re handling the situation well. Removing these abandoned vehicles would place a financial burden that Transportation and Parking Services probably couldn’t handle without passing on an increased fee to students. Something tells me that another fee like the $300 overnight parking one introduced this year might spark outrage and, frankly, will be worse for public relations than the current abandoned vehicle situation.
This doesn’t mean we’re doomed to have an abandoned-vehicle-strewn-campus for all of time! If a program could be introduced to create accountability for vehicle owners (specifically bike owners) who abandon their vehicles and be implemented in parking conditions on campus, that could lower the abandoned vehicle rate.
The long-term solution will involve more accountability for the vehicle owner, and a new FSU parking condition that requires accountability could solve this problem!
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