Parking woes

It’s almost a 50-50 chance, maybe a one-in-two possibility you could wake up in the morning and flip a coin to determine whether or not you’ll get a parking spot when you arrive at Cal State Long Beach.

CSULB has sold 20,956 parking permits so far – 20,150 fall semester permits and 806 academic year permits, while there are currently only about 13,500 parking stalls available for students. CSULB ordered 28,000 semester permits, 3,000 yearlong permits and 1,000 carpool permits for fall semester. Only 496 of the carpool permits have been claimed, leaving 504 available for other students looking to ease their commutes. 

Construction projects around campus have caused some lots to close and left limited parking stalls in others. Lot 8 will be closed throughout the construction of Peterson Hall 3, and Lot 11A is now the site for the new Parking Structure 3 and is unavailable for parking until construction is complete.

Students are finding it disheartening to pay the increased parking fee with parking being so difficult to find.

“I gave up on parking last semester,” said Erica Santifer, a senior theater major. “Right now I’m parking away from campus at the Marina. I refuse to pay $125 for a parking permit. $125 [$123] is just too much. I can’t wait for the parking structure to be finished, because right now, it’s just so hard to get parking.”

Students are able to park at the Marina near the intersection of Pacific Coast Highway and Second Street for free and can ride either a shuttle or the Passport D bus back to campus.

“I just went straight over to the Marina, because there wasn’t any parking,” said Julia McDaniel, a sophomore liberal studies major. “I have a friend, and it took 30 minutes for her to get parking. [A security guard] handed us a little slip saying to park at the Marina, because the lot was full. I was 20 minutes late. I don’t think they should be building the parking lot [structure] because now the lot is overflowing because there’s no parking.”

Rideshare Program Coordinator Elissa Thomas said improvements have been made to the Marina Parking Lot to provide more comfort for students using that option. A shade tent has been set up and a bus stop for the Long Beach Transit Passport D bus. The Passport D does not go to the Marina Lot on the weekends or during summer and winter sessions because the campus is less crowded and parking is generally not an issue.

More efforts have been made to encourage students to use alternative methods of transportation than in previous years.

Students who walk, bike, carpool, or take the bus or shuttle to school are eligible to enter monthly drawings for Beach Bucks prizes. One person will win $50, one person will win $20, and three people will win $10.

The U-Pass program was another plan to alleviate parking problems.

CSULB paid LBT $26,000 for the one-month program, which allows students, faculty and staff to ride LBT for free from Aug. 25 to Sept. 30.

According to Mary Stephens, the vice president of administration and finance, the money comes from the Alternate Transportation Program, which is funded by fines and parking tickets given on campus.

Part of the money collected from parking citations goes to funding alternate methods of transportation, Stephens said.

In the first week of free bus rides — the week prior to the start of the semester — 2,694 people with CSULB IDs rode LBT 5,559 times. Days with the highest number of boardings were Wednesday, Aug. 27, Thursday, Aug. 28 and Friday, Aug. 29, with 1,001 rides, 1,300 rides and 1,201 rides respectively.

LBT tracks each student ID to find out how many students are riding, and how many times a day each student rides the bus.

The most commonly ridden LBT routes are Route 171, which travels along Pacific Coast Highway to Seal Beach, Passport D, which travels from downtown Long Beach to the Los Altos Market place on Bellflower Boulevard and Stearns Street, and the 90 line, which includes Routes 91, 92, 93, 94 and ZAP 96 traveling along Seventh Street and Bellflower Boulevard. The 90 lines saw the most rides with more than 1,000 passengers from Aug. 25 through Aug. 31.

      Jonathan Oyama contributed to this report.