Parking passes sell out; parkade will cost $900 per year
by Jesse Hove
Students who expected a reminder from Mount Royal about winter parking permits were left waiting as parking passes once again sold out within hours of going on sale. Parking permits were made available on Nov. 1 at 8 a.m. In June, an email was sent to warn students of the sale date for fall semester, but no alert was sent for this winter semester.
Kalista Antoniuk was one of the students expecting that reminder, and only found out about the passes going on sale the morning they became available. Though she attempted to buy one online within minutes of the start of the sale, Antoniuk was unable to get her hands on a highly coveted pass. Antoniuk lives in Hidden Valley in the far northwest, and said she simply doesn’t have the time to spend three to three- and-a-half hours commuting on transit to and from the university. “It is just annoying because I really have no other option,” she said. Stefan Durston, manager of parking & transportation services, said the registrar did not allow them to send out mass emails to student accounts over the school year.
“Students are already getting a lot of emails for different Mount Royal University services. So we decided to communicate with students in a variety of different ways, including the mymru homepage, the students’ association, the Student Insider, Facebook, Twitter, and several others communication mediums.”
Fourth-year electronic publishing student Jared Harrill arrived at Mount Royal at 4 a.m. on Nov. 1 in preparation for the parking permit sale. He said while the parking issue is some- thing he has come to expect, he understands that the university is doing the best they can.
“I spent the morning watching movies with my best friend on his laptop,” Harrill said. “This is something I plan for: I bring lots of comfortable blankets and clothes and wait outside. I understand that Mount Royal is trying their best to improve the parking issues, but I think the least they could do is let us inside early on the day that the parking passes go on sale.”
Durston says parking issues should improve as early as January when the parkade opens, and will provide 900 new parking permits to students willing to pay $450 for six months of parking. In contrast, open lot permits cost $180 per semester. “As long as the safety inspection of the building goes well, which we expect it to, then students will have the building available to them at the beginning of next semester,” he said.
