Alex Wilbur, a third-year Linguistics student, was surprised when it took him about five minutes to find a parking space before class on Tuesday. So when he returned on Thursday, he made a point of showing up a little earlier, only to find an even bleaker situation. He ended up 20-minutes late for a sign language class.
Around the same time, sophomore Business major Ashleigh Tatarcyk was finishing an unsuccessful lap around campus in her car before deciding to make a brief detour for coffee. Surely, she thought, there would be a place to park when she returned. She had thankfully gotten her caffeine fix before coming back to a line of vehicles backed up far down the street. Her professor was understanding when she showed up to class a half-hour late.
Before this semester began, it would be safe to assume these were stories from years ago, back before the parking garage on Bedford Street went up in early 2004. It offered more than just added convenience; the five-story, 1,200-space structure finally made driving to the Portland campus tolerable.
There were some kinks at the start. The Free Press published complaints at the time that some drivers found the flow of traffic to be counter-intuitive, leaving some stuck in circles. More annoyingly, a computerized exit gate could sometimes seem to channel the defiant H.A.L. from 2001: A Space Odyssey and reject perfectly good ID cards of people attempting to pass.
But for the most part, glitches were small and easily remedied. The end result was a virtual guarantee that students had a place to park throughout the school week.
So it has alarmed many that just four years later, the campus is already showing signs of having outgrown the garage; once again leaving students stressed about getting to class on time.
School officials have been surprised by just how much of a problem parking has become this semester, though a slight squeeze was expected. The most obvious culprit is completion of the University Commons project, even if on its surface it has just meant the re-location of programs and activities that were already taking place nearby.
The brand new Wishcamper Center, right next to the garage, is now home to the Muskie School for Public Service and Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. With he plush new space has come new freedom for the schools-within-a-school.
Previously, Osher often found itself working around the rest of the University from the lower levels of Payson Smith Hall.
“”..it felt like we were always fighting for classroom space,” says David Murray, a volunteer on the OLLI board.
But now, the Institute doesn’t have to think twice about slating a class or lecture for even the busiest times of the week – namely mid-day Tuesdays and Thursdays, when most students are reporting the worst delays.
Another unintended side-effect of the Commons project was the renovation of the ancient outdoor student lot at the Woodbury Campus Center, which required re-building out of safety concerns from the new sidewalks and intersection. The redesign only added insult to the parking crisis, as campus police say about 30-40 spaces had to be eliminated.
Dean of Student Life Craig Hutchinson says there are no plans to expand the garage or add any new parking lots in the foreseeable future. In the short term, the school is just going to have to work with what its got. In one instance of this, signs are being made up that will allow students to park in the faculty lot near the law building on certain days, for a limited time. The school also has 35-40 spaces out at 15 Baxter Boulevard that it is trying to encourage students to make use of, the walk over to Portland’s Back Cove being potentially shorter than some of the waits for spaces right next to school.
Other than that, patrol officers say they will just try to become more vigilant about ticketing and towing cars they find parked without the necessary stickers, a move sure to be a mixed blessing for many students.
Hutchinson says the real solution to the mess will probably be an indirect results of changes already in the works, beginning when President Botman took office in July. She immediately targeted the school’s scheduling methodology for a major overhaul, expressing a desire to see classes spread thinner over the days and weeks, as well as to incorporate more “distance education” courses taught over the web.
The intent is to turn the University on it’s head and help create the “21st century” institution she often refers to in speeches. For those just trying to find a place to stash their car for a couple of hours, a return to normalcy might be enough.