Why are there no free parking spots at CSULB?
 

By Kristopher Hanson
Summer Forty-Niner

As most local residents can attest to, parking in certain areas of Long Beach often proves to be expensive and frustrating.

Downtown, planned and built before Southern California's love affair with the automobile became notorious, is jam-packed with hotels, office buildings, restaurants and apartment houses, but too little public parking.

Sure, there are usually plenty of spots around, but most are owned either by the city or private businesses. Parking there for an hour can range anywhere from $1 to $5, depending on the time of year and location.

If you're fortunate enough to find one of the few free spaces, you'll probably be rushing through your business, as most of these slots are time-constrained to 30 minutes.

Belmont Shore is no different, maybe worse in some ways, as it has more residential traffic, meaning vehicles will be parked in the same spot for longer periods. As a result of the car crush in that part of town, which has exceeded maximum capacity for years, people who drive there to shop, eat or recreate are usually forced to feed the green parking meters that line the streets.

But there is a reward for those who wait until peak traffic hours have passed. Parking at city-owned meters between the hours of 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. is free throughout the city. said Jan Skaggs, Long Beach Police Department's parking enforcement supervisor.

But Cal State Long Beach, a commuter campus whose students and faculty come from all across Orange, Los Angeles and outlying counties, offers virtually no free parking whether it's day, night, summer or winter.

A parking pass is usually required in all but a handful of the roughly 10,500 general parking spots across campus grounds, except in the case of certain special events.

Other parking spaces available to CSULB students and visitors include 327 parking meters slots, handicapped zones and carpool spaces. The precious 20 free parking slots the university offers are located in front of the parking enforcement building and University Police department.  They allow motorists exactly ten minutes of free time.

Stay longer, and you can face a $25 parking fine.

Bucking the trend of other CSU universities in the vicinity, among them Cal State Fullerton and Cal State Dominguez Hills, CSULB officials in the early 1980s decided to eliminate short-term free parking in favor of parking meters whose rates have now inched up to $1 an hour.

Those rates exceed Los Angeles and Long Beach, except at beach-front lots.

In contrast, Cal State Fullerton offers 177 free 30-minute slots and 24 15-minute spots in prime locations across their campus where students, faculty and visitors can park, do a quick errand, and get out free of charge.

Dominguez Hills has a similar set-up, offering more than 100 free parking spaces for the same purposes.

So why are CSULB students and visitors forced to pay virtually everywhere they park on campus? CSULB officials argue the reason for this is the heavy amount of traffic that cumulates on campus each day.  Senior CSULB Parking and Transportation Director Thomas Bass stressed that high vehicle turnover is essential to providing adequate short-term parking, and parking meters are proven to create the type of short-term parking the university needs.

"When we had the free slots, it didn't provide the goals for short term access," Bass explained.  "There's just too much demand for (it)."

According to Bass, students would take advantage of the slots and frequently park there longer than the time allowed.

"Enforcement was an issue," Bass said. "It's harder to observe how long the vehicles stay."

Parking meters, Bass said, are self-policing because all a parking enforcement officer has to do is check and see if the meter's time is up.  Before, they were required to mark the vehicles, usually on the tire, and then observe them to monitor how long it had been parked.

Cal State Fullerton officials on the other hand say that the free parking spaces offers students a benefit by allowing them to do a quick errand for free.

"It allows them a chance to go to the bookstore, do their registration, grab a bite to eat at Carl's Jr. or drop stuff off," said Paulette

Blumberg, CSUF's associate parking director, although she does admit "those stalls have the highest ticket violation for parking over time (allowed)."

Still, she said authorities there have not considered parking meters because of possible inaccuracy problems and other "pros and cons."

A recent scandal in the city of Los Angeles found that many parking meters in the downtown area were inaccurate, and city officials were eventually forced to replace parking meters and hand out $750,000 in parking ticket refunds to the more than 24,000 motorists who had been fraudulently charged.

The parking meters used at Cal State Long Beach come from the same manufacturer, Duncan Industries, as the ones Los Angeles used, but are a different model, Bass said.

"Still, no equipment is 100% infallible," Bass admitted.  "But we have ways to check the accuracy of the meters and they are audited weekly."

If a student feels the meter they're parked at is inaccurate, enforcement officers will test the meter with a gadget and to check accuracy, Bass said, but he doesn't recall that ever happening.

"There's no (inaccuracy) trend here like you might find elsewhere," Bass claimed, adding that he can't recall any instances of a parking meter reading inaccurately.

CSU, Dominguez Hills in Carson also has no meters, but does offer more than 125 free 30-minute parking slots, CSUDH parking director Mark Cartwright said.

Help may be on the way for those visitors and students tired of carrying the coins required for short-term parking at CSLUB.

Parking officials here are looking into ways to provide parking at the meters, with a valid student parking pass, during designated hours in the evening and early morning, Bass said. "We're considering placing bags on meters so that it would be used for general parking," Bass said.  "But the meters are so heavily used so long into the semester that it could be difficult."

Another frustrating aspect of the parking meters is that while they are listed as being enforced between the hours of 7 a.m. and 11 p.m. on the meter's themselves, a sign posted to each one says the meters are enforced at all times by the California Vehicle Code (C.V.C). Bass said while the official policy is to enforce at all times, Parking and Transportation employees go home at 10 p.m. and he can't control what happens after that.

"Seven a.m. to 10 p.m. is our active enforcement time, after that the university police enforce," Bass said.  "They can issue tickets the same as we can."

University Police said they do enforce parking on campus, but usually only when a vehicle is illegally parked, such as on a red curb or in a handicapped space, or if it doesn't have a proper parking permit and is left on campus overnight.

"They do have the authority," said Greg Pascal, University Police communication supervisor.  "But it's up to the officer to make the decision."

University Police don't keep parking meter enforcement high on their priority list and don't keep track of tickets issued, Pascal explained.

"We usually just wait until the parking tickets stack up and then send them over to parking enforcement," Pascal noted, adding that police issue the hand-written tickets, unlike the machine printed ones given out by parking enforcement.

In addition to the meters officially being enforced at all hours, general parking at the campus's 10,500 spaces is also officially enforced most hours of the week, unlike Cal State Fullerton and Dominguez Hills.

"We only enforce parking Monday through Thursday from 7 a.m. to 10 (p.m.) and Friday's from 7 to 5," Blumberg, the CSUF parking director, said. "Weekends are not enforced either, except for special events."

Students who live in the dorms here can park overnight in designated lots, but must pay for a special permit issued by CSULB's Parking and Transportation Services.

In addition, the campus does offer free student parking in the lower-campus lots during weekend hours, unless there is a special event, Bass said.

While some students' cringe at the thought of paying $63 for semester parking permits here, the rate is comparable to the $54 CSUF charges.

Dominguez Hills recently raised their rate to $64, but have now added more than 3,500 new parking spaces across their campus, Cartwright said.
 
As for the revenue collected from parking tickets, most of which is required by state law to go into alternative transportation methods for students, CSULB spends nearly all of it on the campus shuttle buses, Bass said.

In contrast, Cal State Dominguez Hills and Cal State Fullerton designate their ticket revenue into a myriad of alternative transportation programs, including subsidized bus and rail passes, the free parking spaces, carpool programs and the shuttle buses.

Fullerton is even testing a "valet" program this fall in hopes of easing the parking situation there, which has turned into gridlock on some of the more busy days, Blumberg said.

The valet program will allow students to check their keys with a parking attendant, who would then park the student's vehicle behind or in between other valet-parked vehicles and issue the student a number, Blumberg explained.

When the student returns, they would hand the attendant their number and the attendant would then fetch the vehicle from the lot, even if it meant moving other vehicles to get it out, she said.

They hope to add roughly 200 vehicles to each major parking lot with this new program until they can finally build a proposed $25 million-dollar, 2,000 space-parking garage, similar to the parking structure at CSULB, in the next few years.

CSULB does not offer subsidized bus passes, Bass said.

"It was either retain and expand the shuttle program or (offer subsidies), we couldn't do both," Bass said.

In the Spring 2000 semester, CSULB parking enforcement officers issued 2,874 parking fines at the campus's 327 parking meters, most of which were $25 tickets for parking over the designated time, said Dee Jones, the citation processing coordinator with parking and transportation.

Between July 1, 1998 and July 1, 1999, the university collected roughly $708,000 in ticket revenues, with $540,778 going into alternative transportation programs, including a carpooling program, and the rest into various other areas. The $50,393 leftover was set into a general reserve fund to cover "unforeseen situations" in the future, Bass said.

During the same time period, parking and transportation collected more than $4 million dollars in revenues from parking passes and meters, ending the fiscal year with a roughly $600,000 surplus that goes into a reserve fund for future parking expansion and upkeep.

So while motorists may find the parking meters annoying, they‘d better get used to keeping extra change in the ashtray.

CSULB parking officials do not plan to remove the meters or change enforcement hours.