Senior art education major Faith Lee spent 30 minutes trying to find a parking space yesterday, making her late to her art 387 class.
“It’s always like this,” Lee said. “It’s always bad.”
She is one of many students who found it difficult to find a parking spot at Cal State Long Beach during the first week of classes. Even though Lee said she thinks the parking is always bad, other students noticed that getting a spot was worse yesterday compared to other semesters.
“I usually park here every semester,” senior geography major Jessica Reyes said, standing in parking lot 11A near Palo Verde. “It’s never this packed. It’s way more insane than I have ever seen it before.”
Parking General Manager Mark Rudometkin said the primary reasons for the limited number of parking spaces include the additional 1,500 students enrolled this semester; the increase in purchases of student parking passes; and the decision to increase the unit cap to 18 units.
“The fact that students are here trying to add classes … they are here for a longer frame time,” Rudometkin said. “We haven’t seen as much turnover.”
Cars lined the outskirts of parking lots 11A and 11B by the Student Wellness and Recreation Center, and the two new parking structures, 2 and 3, were full. Parking officials opened handicapped spots, employee spaces and the curb along Earl Warren Drive yesterday for students to park.
“The field staff … have been working very hard to put students in spaces or areas we don’t normally use,” Rudometkin said.
For the first time in CSULB history, parking and transportation services emailed courtesy parking passes to students, Rudometkin said. The passes, which were sent out on Friday, gave students the ability to park for free during the first week of class and will expire on Saturday.
According to Rudometkin, Parking and Transportation Services has always distributed courtesy parking passes during the first week of school; however, the passes were usually handed out at the cashier’s office in Brotman Hall.
The passes were emailed this year to prevent the website, where students buy passes, from crashing, like it did in 2011 when too many students purchased permits at one time.
Even though a number of cars had the free parking permits displayed on their dashboards, Rudometkin said that it is too early to say if this is one of the primary causes of the overcrowded parking lots.
“It’s really hard to tell,” he said. “It will be interesting to see what next week looks like.”