There are very few things about UCONN that I dislike. It’s a great school with great people and even better opportunities. However, there is one thing that really, really, REALLY grinds my gears. The parking… where do I even begin?
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The price of parking passes-
College tuition in enough as is, but adding on an extra couple hundred just to have your car on campus is crazy. Just to give you an example, my parking pass was close to $500. I take classes at the Hartford branch a few days a week so my own transportation to get there is pretty necessary I would say. It costs me $500 just to have my car here and in a convenient location. Most people are paying within the $200-400 dollar range just to have their car. To give a little insight, my high school parking pass was $99. Still expensive, but a little more reasonable.
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Convenience of parking-
for most people just taking classes on campus, there’s honestly very little reason to have your car. If it’s raining and you want to drive to class, you can’t. There’s no where to park unless you want to bite a 30$ ticket (I’ll talk about that later). If you live off campus and want to drive to the rec center or a dining hall? There is no where to park. Really, the only place you can park is in your specific lot of your pass, which are all in quite inconvenient locations might I add. The lots that you are able to park in are pretty far from most popular locations on campus. Which means that the purpose of the car is somewhat defeated.
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Tickets-
I Have been at UCONN for about 2 months now and I have already received three orange tickets on my windshield. Each time was me briefly parking somewhere to run into a building quickly. Somehow parking services found my car within the ten minutes I was gone and ticketed me. That’s a total of $90 I’ve spent so far at college just on parking tickets. Trust me it’s not just me. Last year, parking services gave out 1 million dollars worth of parking tickets. 1. Million. Dollars. Just let that sink in. They are robbing broke college students of the money they don’t even have to begin with.