Employees and students at UMass Chan Medical School and UMass Memorial Medical Center are all acutely aware of how challenging it is to park on campus. Many individuals struggle to find a parking spot in their assigned lot or are continually forced into further and further away lots as the University and Hospital expand. From my own perspective, it takes me about 20-30 minutes from when I arrive on campus to find parking and walk (often outside through the cold or snow or rain) to get to where I work, and this ends up being nearly twice as long as my commute to work itself. I'm sure many others have this same struggle.

Along my walk I see a number of closer lots and empty parking spots that I'm not allowed to use or even pay more to use. And if I ever decide to use one of these empty spots, I am given a parking ticket. I know many fellow students and employees who simply pay this parking ticket on a daily basis because their work requires them to come and go so frequently that a 20 minute walk to parking and back whenever they go is absurd.

UMass Chan Medical School and UMass Memorial Medical Center have recently been expanding with the addition of the new VA clinic at the hospital and the building of the New Education and Research Building which together have 65 new exam rooms and 77 new labs which will clearly add 100s of new employees who need to park on campus. You would imagine with these new constructions that the campus would expand parking options, but in fact, portions of the on campus parking garage were demolished diminishing the available parking and worsening the situation even before many of these new employees have even been hired.

The administration has been pressed on this on numerous occasions and their response has been to send out a survey to employees asking how we could be convinced to use public transit in a city where there is only one bus route that serves the medical campus and arrives maybe once an hour. For a system that combined has more than 20,000 employees and 1,100 students it is unacceptable to continually restrict the parking options while expanding and put additional economic burden on the employees be it through time cost or parking tickets rather than working on solutions to improve the situation of the important healthcare workers and researchers that work her.

My suggestion in the immediate sense is to request that UMass Chan Medical School Chancellor Michael Collins  and UMass Memorial Medical Center President and CEO Eric Dickson as well as other individuals in the administration of this campus pledge to resolve the parking situation and instead of their reserved spots close to their offices use the lowest tier of employee parking until the situation is improved for all.