OU Parking

[ETL]

Does anyone on here have any clue as to why OU has to be so difficult with parking? Why not a new parking garage? (Ideas as to where to put it?) It seems OU is getting more and more crowded as they take more and more parking away for projects.

[blangtang]

Park at the Lloyd Noble and ride the shuttle. It is simple.

[ETL]

It now costs $195 to park there. Might as well park at main campus.

Plus I have to pay the $195 because I work on campus after hours, so that doesn't work. I was hoping to get a discussion on this going- you know, ideas on how to improve parking.

[Superhyper]

To be fair it doesn't cost anything to park there if you park in the 1200 spaces allocated for the shuttle Park&Ride. You could also take the bus if it has service near you.

[bluedogok]

I think parking on the UT campus is basically a lottery system, they do not have near enough spots for all the students. A friend's son started there this semester, I seem to remember him saying the parking fee was around $500 a semester. I think most have gone to a park-n-ride system (like the Lloyd Noble lot) because they just can't get the available land for parking. I think my parking sticker was $25.00 a semester when I was at OU.

In Austin we do more garage parking but that is due to impervious cover restrictions and not land costs. I know in our site planning we use an estimated price of $500 per spot for surface parking and $2,500-3,000 per sport for structured parking exclusive of land costs (I think, my cheat sheet is on the computer at the office). In most of our cases the developer already has the land or has accounted for that expense elsewhere, our estimate is only for site/building costs but I have seen it as high as $5,000 per spot. Structured parking is much more expensive than surface parking which is why it is not the preferred option when you don't have to do it.

[blangtang]

It now costs $195 to park there. Might as well park at main campus.

Plus I have to pay the $195 because I work on campus after hours, so that doesn't work. I was hoping to get a discussion on this going- you know, ideas on how to improve parking.

Well, I could tell you of some free parking just north of campus in the neighborhood if you don't mind the 5 minute walk to campus. Or there are the church lots just north of campus on University that charge less than OU does for parking. Or we could talk about banning freshman from getting parking permits. Maybe that would help. Maybe it will never happen. Or we could talk about CART not operating a transit system effectively enough to discourage people outside of the campus area bringing their cars with them to campus, LOL!

Yeah when I was a undergrad i got a few parking tickets and parking was a bitch still and i eventually payed the i think in 1998 price of $85 for a parking pass and still bitched about it! Funny thing, I was looking at some old papers from the bursars office and in 2000 the cost of tuition for 15 hours with all the fees, etc was $1500/semester. How crazy is that. ~3k a year for tuition back then, it must be around double that now for in state tuition.

[bluedogok]

Yeah when I was a undergrad i got a few parking tickets and parking was a bitch still and i eventually payed the i think in 1998 price of $85 for a parking pass and still bitched about it! Funny thing, I was looking at some old papers from the bursars office and in 2000 the cost of tuition for 15 hours with all the fees, etc was $1500/semester. How crazy is that. ~3k a year for tuition back then, it must be around double that now for in state tuition.

To go along with my $25 parking sticker my tuition & fees for 15 hours was $341.....that was in 1982.

[blangtang]

To go along with my $25 parking sticker my tuition & fees for 15 hours was $341.....that was in 1982.

Man, talk about a bubble ... brewing...

Oh and I worked nights at the starbucks in the basement of Bizzel library. There is a surface lot on the NW corner of Elm and Brooks, just south of Goddard Health Center, with free parking after 6pm or so. Probably other free lots after a certain hour.

Maybe OU should buy up that historic neighborhood just west of campus, like Chatauqua and Lahoma are close streets to the campus. Then they could scrape those lots and put some parking garages real close to campus and by those Greek mansions.

[semisimple]

I think parking on the UT campus is basically a lottery system, they do not have near enough spots for all the students. A friend's son started there this semester, I seem to remember him saying the parking fee was around $500 a semester. I think most have gone to a park-n-ride system (like the Lloyd Noble lot) because they just can't get the available land for parking. I think my parking sticker was $25.00 a semester when I was at OU.

It's a lottery system only for certain parking zones. There are nine large parking garages at UT which (to my knowledge) never fully sell out, although the garages with available spots are always the ones situated on the periphery of campus which are inconveniently located for most people. When I was commuting to UT by car, a garage permit was roughly $300 per long semester and $150 for the summer semester. $500 per semester might be the rate for surface parking, which is very limited on campus.

[kevinpate]

I don't visit campus often at all, but when I do, I lament no longer having a blue fac/staff card. Employer leased space from the uni, and we had those as a result.
Can usually find convenient parking nearby now, but yeah, lil' blue did make life easier at times.

[t3h_wookiee]

That was one nice thing about WPI up in Mass-freshmen were not allowed to have cars on campus at all. It really cut down on the parking headache for a small campus like that. At OU I tried to live near a CART stop, or I would just park at LNC and ride the free shuttle once they started that up. One year when we rented a house I tried the whole buying a commuter pass and parking in the garage thing. That rarely worked well. It sucked to have to show up to campus an hour before class to even have a remote chance at parking on campus (this was before the LNC shuttle).

[u50254082]

OU parking is the way it is because they allow parking to be its own department that is independently run and operated. I don't know how anyone who works for OU transit/parking can live with themselves (that includes the meter maids).

I'm going to regret going back to OU for graduate school

[aintaokie]

Parking operations are the same at almost all universities. There are rules & regulations that have to be followed anywhere you go (or park). There are people who also work to enforce these rules & regs so that parking can be run in the best way possible. If you break the rules, you'llr get a ticket by the parking "Nazi's". This being said by one of you friendly neighborhood OU Parking Nazi's.......park smart. And yes I can live with my self & the small pay check my job provides

[kevinpate]

Issues with parking at OU exist primarily because Oklahomans, and those who come here for school, by and large want to park just outside the door of the most needed building, arriving right before the appointed time, and not walking far once they are ready to get back in their ride. That's rarely possible on a college campus anywhere,a nd OU was no exception when I was there, nor is it now.

And yeah, I admit anytime I could, I took the closest spot I could get as well. And sometimes, before the lil' blue tag, I took an incorrect spot and sent some money in when this was noticed and recorded by those who carried parking pocket puters.

[Spartan]

Here's an idea ETL, either walk or ride a bike. Or if you're so dead-set on it, fine, go ahead and park your car right in the classroom. I wonder what the parking permit $$ is for that. Hope you drive a Lambo or a Ferrari or else you won't look very cool doing it.

[OUman]

It's a good thing I have a bike, so parking is almost never an issue for me. If I do drive to campus, I almost always do on the weekends when parking is free campus-wide, or park at Lloyd Noble and ride in the shuttle. If it comes to it, I use the metere spots but that's rare.

[Jersey Boss]

OU Parking permits are really a parking Hunting License.

[kawititnow]

I'm fixing to return to OU this Spring to get my 2nd undergraduate degree. I remember the parking the first time around and it was a nightmare. The garages were ALWAYS full, and I usually had to park in Multi-Purpose parking even though I had a Commuter permit.

For the OU football games we tailgate at Brooks and Trout, and the owner of the property allows us to "buy" a parking spot that it ours for the entire season. So we could show up at half-time and still have our guaranteed parking spot. So I hit up the owner of the property to see about letting me park there for school, and he more than happily obliged. So now I have a GUARANTEED parking spot that's close to campus, and I don't have to go hunting.

Plus I don't have to worry about jack-holes dinging my doors.