Fall parking passes sold out

Photo courtesy istockphoto.com. Parking passes are sold out for the fall semester after four days of long lines at the parking office and an influx of online purchases.

Fall parking passes at Mount Royal College under a new pricing structure and “free-for-all” system that sees students, staff and faculty sharing general lots have officially sold out in record time.
Passes went on sale the morning of July 2 and four days later there were none to be had with the exception of evening/weekend passes, said Stefan Durston, the college’s manager of parking and transportation services.
“It went a little faster than I thought it would, but I did anticipate them selling out a lot sooner than normal,” he said. “”I thought we would get into the 15th of July or something like that.”
Last year the permits sold out a few days before the first day of classes in early September. This year there were 1,500 fewer passes available due to the construction of a $45-million parkade.

Graphic courtesy Mount Royal parking office. The planned parking layout for the 2009-10 at Mount Royal shows lots V1 and S7 closed for parkade construction.

In response to the massive construction project the college revamped its parking structure and pricing index. A general lot pass went up from $105 to $180 per semester to help cover the cost of the project.

For more on the parkade click here

“There has been a significant amount of positive feedback,” Durston said with regards to the new parking structure.
He also noted that any student — including new students— that registered before June 30 received an email to their MyMRC acocount about the permit sale and all had the opportunity to purchase the pass online if they could not make it down to the parking office.
“We have has a massive amount of Saskatchewan and British Columbia sales so the message got out to those people,” Durston said, also noting that long lines swamped the parking office for three days when the permits went on sale. “Clearly we are not going to reach everyone. We didn’t get them last year or the year before.”

For more on Mount Royal’s new parking structure click here

For those who didn’t purchase a pass in time, other options include taking Calgary Transit using the U-Pass that is included in the price of tuition for all full-time students or purchasing a day pass in lots A and B for $4 each day.
“We assume that let’s say of the roughly 12,000 students at Mount Royal that 8,000 are on campus each day,” Durston said. “We say that a certain number are going to take the bus . . . we have the capacity to hold a majority in those other lots but we definitely do need people to use alternative means of transportation.”
The day lots were originally constructed with the thought that students could drive to school a few days each week and use transit the other days, Durston said.

To read about a survey that concluded that Mount Royal’s parking is a “nightmare” click here

In an interview with The Reflector in May, Durston acknowledged that the parking situation at Mount Royal “is definitely going to get worse” before it gets better, however he believes parking services has done everything in their power to inform students of their options for the upcoming school year.
“We have communicated with all of the students and all of the students were aware of the capacity and that’s why the passes sold out so quickly,” he said. “We have adjusted the expectation for September, obviously everyone had a fair shake at this.”

Please share your thoughts on the parking sell-out in the comments section below or by e-mailing jnolais@gmail.com.