As I hope you are aware by now, parking on campus is a huge problem. There are not nearly enough parking spots for off-campus students. We are left to choose between not going to class because there are 0 spots and getting an absence or parking illegally to make it to class only to come back to a $300 ticket. Unfortunately, simply arriving early is not a solution as many of us are getting here well over 40 minutes before class and still not finding a parking spot. I personally have spent over an hour on many separate occasions looking for parking only to still be late to class because I had to park in Snider Plaza.

There are 12,400 students enrolled in this University and less than 3,000 students are living on campus (numbers given on your website). That means over 9,000 off-campus students have to find parking every day. East Campus has parking garages for their graduate classes and the Law School has its own parking garage, leaving roughly 7,000 students coming to the main campus every day searching for a place to park their car.

Each of the garages that off-campus students are allowed to park in is shared with faculty and staff, and three of these garages are shared with on-campus students as well. While Hillcrest Parking Center is one of the garages we are allowed to park in, it is incredibly inconvenient to park at the southwest side of campus when the majority of classes are at the northeast side of campus. This means that off-campus students vie for parking in one of the three garages which are relatively close to their classes: Moody Parking Center, Airline Parking Center, and Binkley Parking Center. Moody & Airline Parking Center each have 4 floors of parking for all students. Assuming the staff and faculty park in their designated areas (although they are allowed to and often park in the upper levels), off-campus students must share available parking spaces with on-campus students, who have the Mustang Parking Center solely for them. While these should be sufficient, they simply are not.

In addition to looking at the total number of students enrolled in the university, it would benefit to look at the number of off-campus students and parking spaces available to them -- assuming that the available student parking is taken only by students solely:

●      Airline Parking Center is 133,200 sq ft and one parking space in this garage takes up about 180 sq ft. Seeing that the first level is restricted to ADA and Faculty, that leaves us with 555 parking spots available to all students on the remaining levels.

●      Moody Parking Center has 830 parking spots, the first level is for faculty and staff who end up parking in upper levels as well. Moody, therefore, has about 664 parking spots.

●      Hillcrest Parking Center has a total of 440 parking spaces, but half of those spaces are restricted to ADA, faculty or staff, and visitors, leaving about 220 spots open for students.

●      Binkley Parking Center has 854 parking spaces, but students are not allowed to park on the first two floors, so that leaves students with 512 parking spots.

●      Meadows Museum Parking Center has one single floor of parking for off-campus students which is shared with faculty or staff so I can say that Meadows offers no more than 80 parking spots in that garage.

Adding together the estimated amount of student parking spots in each garage, I determined that students have a little over 2,000 parking spots on campus. It is your responsibility as a university to provide adequate parking for students.

Due to University Park Zoning Regulations (put in effect in 2018), SMU is required to provide and maintain a minimum of 5,723 parking spaces. It is evident that this regulation has been satisfied with your abundance of faculty/staff parking and metered parking and while that may satisfy the university’s requirement from the city zoning regulations, it does not solve the issue your 9,000+ students are facing.

Furthermore, in June, you were approved for a zoning change request, which would be a great opportunity to build multi-level parking garages, but instead, you are building a new institutional building and adding surface-level parking, allotting 114 additional parking spots to campus. I understand that there is backlash from the University Park community and UC zoning regulations make this difficult, but you need to advocate for your students because we can’t in this situation. Although it may seem like it at this school, I know money does not grow on trees. Multi-level parking garages cost per space anywhere between $12,000-15,000 per parking spot which, depending on the number of spots, can be costly. That being said, there is a constant influx of donations to this school and if families saw that they would be donating to something that would directly help their child(ren), I firmly believe more people would donate. A parking garage is something ALL students will need and use at some point or another within their four years here.

I do realize that directing expenses to improve the school’s unique features (like museums or institutional buildings with impressive technology) is important to the administration to draw more interest from non-SMU affiliated people, the students who are already enrolled here deserve your attention. In the end, it does not matter how well the school looks from the outside if the core of the school - the students - are discontented with the school due to issues that directly affect them.

In conclusion, there must be something done regarding the lack of parking spots on campus available for students. I am not demanding a new parking garage, but I am asking for the school to actively work on this issue. It is not my place to put restrictions on parking permits, rather it's yours, but personally, I do not understand how on-campus students have more parking available than off-campus students. For every one student living on campus, there are four students living off-campus. Likewise, between full-time and part-time employees, there are less than 3,000 faculty and staff at this school, so is there really a need for every level of every parking garage to be accessible to faculty and staff? On-campus students and faculty/staff combined do not surpass the number of off-campus students, yet off-campus students have fewer parking options than either. Obviously putting restrictions on parking permits will not be liked by all, but you need to reassess the parking permit situation and come up with a solution to the lack of student parking fast.

Thank you for your time and attention to this matter.