Subduing Security with Parking Panache

So, you’ve finally convinced the ‘rents to let you take the car to college. After the initial exhilaration of being free to make the epic trip to Global-Mart whenever you damn well please wears off, you might end up thinking that having a car at college can be a real pain in the axle.

First off, expect to pay anywhere from $50-$200 just for the parking sticker – quite possibly the most expensive sticker you’ve bought since that time you put the “*Daddy’s Little Girl*” bumper sticker on your Hummer and had to keep paying to repair the mysterious key scratches that kept appearing!

But I wouldn’t complain about the cost of that sticker too much because allowing students to park on campus is a huge drain on your college’s funds. Constantly making sure the concrete stays in one place and repainting lines every century is a costly and time-consuming job, and your exorbitant parking fee makes it all possible.

The hidden parking fees are what you really have to watch out for, though. Depending on your school, the real reason why you’ll notice your wallet looking skinnier than Calista Flockhart is known as PARKING ILLEGALLY, which can be defined as, “Parking anywhere outside of the 3 designated ‘Student Commuter Parking for Full-Time Students Attending a Psychology 101 Class Before 1:00pm‘” parking spots. These spaces may or may not be marked; you should know where they are because you have read and re-read the Holy Handbook of Student Parking before even thinking about adjusting your rear-view.

If you have PARKED ILLEGALLY, you’ll probably frolic out of class to your car and be met by a brightly colored slip of paper thrust under a windshield wiper. Take note: if it is raining out, it may also be smeared across your windshield like so much confetti. Whichever the case, you should do one thing – use the ticket as confetti for the impromptu I-just-got-a-worthless-ticket party you’ll be throwing. Invite anyone within earshot so that they may also join in the fun. (Disclaimer: I do not condone littering but some things must be done in the name of impromptu parties…especially if confetti is involved.) Now that you’ve had your roadside rave, simply drive home and completely forget about the ticket.

After a few weeks, you’ll try to register for classes or get some transcripts sent or the like and there will be a mysterious pending charge on your account. E gads – the confetti wasn’t meant as a party gift at all! Depending on your school, you should expect to pay anywhere from $5-$80 dollars for your indiscretion. At my school, the first one is a warning with no charge, so this really can be used as confetti. After this first warning, we work our way up to a payment plateau of $25 and eventually face a booting if the parking peccadillo continue (booting is when they attach a medieval torture device to your tire so that any attempt at driving ends with 1 fewer axle).

Here are some tips to avoid some of the aforementioned nuisances:

• If your parents pay some or all of your tuition, ask whoever is processing your parking registration if you can just tag the fee on to your tuition. I’ve done this a few times because I didn’t have cash at the time and my parents paid the parking fee without realizing it. (Don’t yell at me – I honestly plan on paying them back when I do things like this, but sometimes they don’t notice and I forget I did it in the first place.)
• You can do the same thing with the tickets themselves – if you aren’t required to pay all fines to clear you for other services (transcripts, grades, registration, etc…), then most of the time they add any unpaid tickets to your tuition.
• Most colleges (especially small ones) use what are lovingly referred to as “rent-a-cops”. This means they aren’t connected to the local police force, and therefore their tickets are only relevant to your campus. If a car isn’t registered in their database, they have no way of knowing who owns the car short of running the plates with the local police. It’s like if you use a fake name to sign up for a library card; even if there was some mythical Overdue Book Brigade, they wouldn’t know who to go after. Basically, if you don’t register your car, you can probably get away with parking anywhere you want for a while, as long as you don’t get too many tickets.I used this method when my main car broke down and I had to borrow my parents’ for a few weeks. Instead of paying to get a temporary parking pass, which is the standard method, I liberally parked anywhere on campus for a few weeks, accruing only a few tickets. I gambled they wouldn’t boot the car until I approached 6 or 7 tickets, so I just confetti’d the tickets I got while using the new, unregistered car.I also took the liberty of parking in various illegal places, such as the revered Faculty Parking. We also have numerous places around campus with Visitor Only parking spaces where people with parking passes get ticketed whereas cars without them do not.These few weeks of parking paradise ended after I switched back to my original car, but it was an awesome way to park wherever I wanted for a while without having to worry about paying those pesky tickets. Warning: if your school is like mine, they will boot a repeat-offender after a certain number of tickets, whether your car is registered or not. At this point you’d have to pay your previous tickets plus the booting fee (whatever that is) in order to emancipate your car from the clutches of Das Boot.
• You can also try to learn Security’s schedule. I noticed that our Security vans only patrol certain parking areas at certain times, so I exploit this and now use a method I like to call “create-a-space” at certain times of the day. (Create-a-space is when you make your own parking spot by parking next to a car that is in a legitimate spot. This lets you park as close to your destination as possible by create-a-spacing right next to the first car in a row.)
• If you do end up getting a ticket, you can always appeal it. At my school, there’s an appeals court that meets every so often for anyone who signs up to debate their ticket. These meetings are brutally boring and tend to last for uncountable hours, but if you really need that $10 for 50cent draft night, it might be worth it. My school’s appeals court pretty much voids every ticket as long as you give a good reason for your transgression.

Tags: avoid tickets, bumper sticker, college parking, full time, hummer, Parking, parking at college, parking sticker, parking tickets, psychology, real reason, rear view, rents, scratches, time students, wallet, windshield