“If you found yourself confused and couldn’t add a parking permit to your fall schedule, you should know that you are not alone. Beginning fall semester, students taking six or more credit hours will no longer have the choice to purchase a parking permit.”
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If you found yourself confused and couldn’t add a parking permit to your fall schedule, you should know that you are not alone.

Beginning fall semester, students taking six or more credit hours will no longer have the choice to purchase a parking permit.

In its place, a Transportation Fee will be added to their tuition.

The $115 mandatory transportation fee will replace the $110 parking permit and pay for costs related to both parking and the Roo Express Shuttle.

Students will still need to request a parking permit if they wish to park on campus.

However, students who do not want a permit will still be assessed the Transportation Fee.

Therefore, even students that do not drive on campus or choose not to use the shuttle will still be paying for the service.

Jim Stafford, Director of Parking Services, said, It is kind of like taxes, do we all get the benefits of taxes we pay? No. Certain groups do, certain groups don’t.

The intended benefit for students is that there will be fewer cars parked on campus.

Stafford hopes that students that live near campus will ride the shuttle to class rather than driving and alleviate congested parking lots and time students waste searching for an empty spot.

The parking permit is there if you want to drive a vehicle, Stafford said. It also covers bussing for you if you want to take advantage of the bussing. If you don’t use either one of those, you are not going to be happy.

We are trying to provide a service to the majority of students; we can’t satisfy all students, Stafford said. There’s no way we would ever be able to do that.

The Transportation Fee is being added to the tuition to pay for the $1.8 million budget for the expanding Roo Express Shuttle Program.

The Roo Express will include five routes and will soon incorporate a bar run route downtown.

It’s amazing how many students calm down once we said there was going to be a bar run route, Stafford said.

Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, the Roo Express Shuttle will expand to include a separate route that will transport students to and from downtown Akron and will run from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m.

There is going to be an accommodation to students so they don’t have to drink and drive, Stafford said.

Also beginning this fall, designated resident student lots will also be in effect.

This is a culture change, Stafford said. Now for the first time there’s going to be designated resident students lots and those are only for resident students only-period.

Our goal is that there will be less driving around, less circling, people will know where they can go and they’ll adjust in the perimeters of the lots they can park in.

According to Parking Services, 46 percent of all resident students bring cars to campus.

If this number is growing than that means the number of resident student cars parked in prime spots all day is also going to increase.

Parking Services is using the designated parking areas in an attempt to avoid this problem.

For the rest of us that do not have a designated parking spot or choose not to jump aboard the Roo Express Shuttle, the only thing we can look forward to this fall is paying the transportation fee.

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