Article 2

Fan Parking

You resisted the urge to press the snooze-button, drove to school right on time, only to find your usual parking lot filled with Recreational Vehicles (RV).
During Cougar football season, this is an all-to-common reality for university students. Any time there is a Friday home game; parking spaces students have paid for are rented out to enthusiastic tailgaters. Washington State University’s (WSU) Parking and Transportation Services (PTS) rent the parking spaces to RV owners for $40 per weekend. The parking lot most affected by this situation, is the yellow lot on Stadium Way, east of WSU’s indoor practice facility.
Students who have purchased parking passes that allow them to park in the same lot, paid $240.97 for the 2008-2009 academic year. In some instances, the RV owners place cones in parking spaces, close to theirs, to save room for friends arriving in other RVs. This is not allowed by WSU’s PTS, but there are no security officers or PTS employees regulating this activity. On at least one occasion, this resulted in a verbal altercation between a student and an RV owner when the student removed the cones from an otherwise empty parking space.
PTS notifies students, who are yellow permit holders, of upcoming RV parking through the MyWSU portal notice system. PTS Field Operations and Transportation Manager, Bridgette Johnson, said students who complain about parking shortages are given temporary access to another parking lot, but for students like sophomore Kaitlin A. Vervoort this solution is inadequate.
Vervoort, who lives at her family’s home in Pullman, said on home game Fridays, she has to park much farther from her classes, adding “valuable time” to her daily commute. “I worry about drunken football fans damaging my car if I park in the same lot, but that parking lot is by far the closest to my classes,” Vervoort said.
Johnson recognizes issues for students like Vervoort, but said WSU has no plans to expand parking in the near future. There is currently an excess of parking, though some of the available lots are farther from campus. Johnson added that the crimson and gray lots, closest to the center of campus, are reserved for student parking-pass-holders living in the residence halls. These lots are not affected by the RV parking. So although the students affected are placed in other parking lots, they are significantly farther from campus causing timing issues for working students like Vervoort.
Vervoort says she also has difficulty parking at the Student Recreation Center (SRC) because the RVs sometimes overflow into those parking lots. “It’s unfortunate that after all of the money I had to spend on the parking pass, I am forced to park on the other side of campus,” Vervoort said. Vervoort lives too far from campus to walk and her house is not close to a bus route.
RVs are allowed to park anytime after 5:00 p.m. on the Thursday before the home game, why the PTS says this is not detrimental to students commuting to class. The RV parking passes rented out, for any yellow lot, are only available to Cougar Football season ticket holders.