KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — The University of Tennessee welcomed more students than ever this year. The university is seeing a combination of higher enrollment and more students attending fewer hybrid classes this year, which has sparked an issue with finding parking.
Many students say they have to arrive at least an hour earlier to make sure they can find a parking spot. Some students, like Garrett Franklin, have been dealing with parking at the university for the last five years.
But this is the first time Franklin says he sees it this busy.
"It's definitely the most crowded it's ever been," Franklin said. "Parking has always been sort of a struggle here at the lot. But even now, this semester, like when you get here at 8 a.m., spots can be hard to come by."
Many students try to arrive earlier, but sometimes there just aren't any spots left.
"Sometimes it does come down to — you're either getting a ticket, or you're super, super late, or you're missing the class completely," said Kendal Valentine, UT student.
But Moira Bindner, communications and customer service manager at parking and transit services at UT, said they haven't run out of parking spaces. They have a formula that helps UT calculate and efficiently tell them how many spaces they can sell passes for.
For example, Bindner said the ratio for staff parking spots this year is 1-to-0.81. That's the number of permits versus the number of parking places. The ratio for the number of residential parking spots is 1-to-1.06.
In other words, for residential students, Bindner said they have sold 4,903 parking passes and they have 4,703 spaces for residential students. Meanwhile, she said they sold 5,122 spaces and the number of spaces that are available is 6,344.
"The Student Government Association is well-aware of the parking strain on campus," said Jordan Brown, the SGA student body president. "As students ourselves, we face this situation every day and continue to advocate for our students based on our own experiences and what we have learned from the campus community."
Bindner explained that every year, they look at the number of staff, the number of students, and what they expect in the dorms to make any adjustments accordingly.
"We have not run out of parking," Bindner said. "And so when we get to a tighter point, that's when we start to look at do we need to make any changes. Now the area that is feeling some pain this year is the rest of the commuter students."
The ratio for the commuters Bindner said is 1-to-1.85, but she explained this is normal and other colleges may go even higher in ratio. But for UT, it's not a problem with the number of spaces. Rather, Binder said the issue is that fewer parking spots are located near major buildings.
"What we have run out of is parking spaces that are close to the buildings," Bindner said. "And so we're in the middle of an education campaign with our students about where they can park. And when this is filled, where the other areas are, might be more on the edges of campus."
Bindner said students can park in the spots located towards the edge of campus and then take UT's shuttle to class.
"We have a shuttle bus. The T-Link at night can come and pick the students up if they are parked a little bit further away," Bindner said.
In the meantime, students said ticketing can be tough and they often find themselves with a citation. Bindner explained that it's necessary for more than 30,000 people who are navigating campus to have some structure. She said the revenue that comes from citations is about 8% to 9%.
Citations can cost from $24 to $32, but Bindner said they have a partnership with the Student Government Association, called Donations for Citations and people can pay with donated food or personal care goods. This is a limited program and they only have 500 tickets they can do for the fall semester, and 250 tickets for the spring.
"We do believe that this problem does have a solution," said Bronw. "But solutions do take time and we are doing everything that we can to help students during this growing period. As we are discussing this issue, our first step has been working to make students more aware of the parking options that are available as our campus community continues to grow."
Bindner said they are looking at options of potentially building more garages. But the challenge is, that it will take some time.
"So we need to help our students understand this is what we have right now," Bindner said. "And UT is undergoing a master planning process, a campus master plan. They had one I think it was about 2012 and they're redoing it relooking at it and so parking is an integral part of that equation."