Lets do some math!

Something I was thinking about this morning as I saw someone from another department sitting in his car in the city's street parking:

Lets say that the city parking meters cost 50 cents for an hour of parking, with a three hour max on the meter at one sitting. If you work an 8 hour day, you would have to plunk $4.00 into a meter every day. If we calculate that there are an average of 20 working days in a month, that works out to be about $80 per month, and over the course of a calendar year you would be paying $960 for parking. (Not to mention if you forget to add coins to the meter and get ticketed, and the inconvenience of probably losing that spot if you have to go anywhere.) For staff, the most expensive parking permit available is a reserved permit at $820, so you'd still be saving $140 over street parking. The cheapest permit is a $205 general parking pass, so that saves $755 over paying the city, and even though it isn't as guaranteed as a reserved spot, there is plenty of parking available between several lots and a (not terribly convenient) parking garage. We'll get some close lot parking back as soon as this new building and the landscapting project are completed after the summer.

Now, for students, it is probably less of a factor, since they don't have to be here every day of the week, so for some of them the street parking might make sense. But lets look at that anyway. Again assuming that parking is 50 cents for an hour, and classes are typically at least three hours, factoring in getting here early enough to get a street space, parking for five hours is $2.50. A student taking two classes a week paying $2.50 each day would spend $20 per month, and about $240 a year on metered parking. Considering that the most expensive annual permit is $185 and the least expensive is $139, the savings is anywhere between $55 and $101. When it comes to paying per semester, however, street parking looks like the cheaper option.

People ask all the time about the parking situation, and why we have to pay when other companies downtown include it in their employee benefits. There are several answers, which include the fact that downtown parking is hard to come by, so is at a premium, and the parking lots and buildings are owned by the institution and cost money to maintain, so parking fees are collected to cover those costs. Now that I've reassured myself that I haven't been throwing money away on a parking pass, I won't feel so terrible about filling out the paperwork for a renewal in a couple of months.