My college forces me to leave my new car at home

Through a battery of new parking restrictions enacted this year, UC San Diego has all but banned the use of cars on campus.

UCSD prohibits on-campus residents like me from buying parking permits as of this year. Underclassman commuters now face similar barriers, as they can only park on campus if they purchase a $5 public parking pass each day. 

At the same time, the school has decreased parking spaces for upperclassman commuters (S spaces) in order to create more spaces for on-campus residents, who, ironically, are now effectively banned from owning permits.

This shift has forced some students to rely on public transit. Others expend tireless efforts moving their cars from spot to spot in hopes of cheating the system, often leading to onslaughts of parking tickets. Others still have been forced to indefinitely abandon their cars, left in the driveways of their childhood homes.

As UCSD expands on-campus housing, establishes new colleges and enrolls record-high numbers of students, its parking infrastructure fails to meet student and faculty needs. The administration only exacerbates the issue by passing Kafkaesque parking restrictions to accommodate ballooning numbers of commuter students. (UCSD did not respond to a request for comment on the subject.)

My freshman year, my family gifted me my first car to celebrate the beginning of college: a white Honda CR-V I lovingly dubbed Brenda. Brenda shuttled members of my school’s Costco Club to our monthly grocery run and my newspaper staff to socials at Kobey’s swap meet; she brought my friends and me to the Asian markets on Convoy Street; she was our primary connection to the outside world, be it coffee shops, Sunday farmers markets or birthday dinners.

Last fall, my mom drove me from Orange County to San Diego and dropped me off at my dorm due to these parking permit bans, leaving me with a feeling eerily similar to the first day of high school. Brenda stayed behind, in the driveway of my childhood home.

As every UCSD student is well aware, the first question when a friend drives you somewhere is, “How are you able to have a car on campus?” Every time, you receive one of three answers: “I’m a commuter with upperclassman standing,” “I live off campus, and I take public transit from my apartment,” or “I move my car every day, multiple times a day, to avoid tickets.” That last one is scarily prevalent, especially as most parking garages are heavily policed by parking staff.

Sam Propst, a second-year engineering and Spanish literature student, commutes an hour to and from school every day. Propst said that parking spaces are now notoriously impossible to find between about 10:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m., with commuters often having to park in the Regents parking zone, which is more than a mile east of the undergraduate campus and only allows drivers to purchase individual day passes. Many others park in surrounding neighborhoods or even parking lots like the one at the Westfield UTC mall.

“I remember my first day ever commuting, I couldn’t even find a space in Regents, so I ended up parking at UTC and taking the trolley to campus,” Propst said.

Addie Olusanya, a third-year transfer student majoring in business economics, has decided not to buy a parking permit for the same reasons. Olusanya lives near Westfield UTC, just a 10-minute drive from campus, but the lack of commuter parking spots forces her to take a bus and a trolley to school, which triples her daily commute time to 30 minutes. 

“At first it was really hard, because I’m new to San Diego, and it was hard to get around,” said Olusanya. “Later, I figured out how the trolley works and how the bus works. But it can be tiring at times,” she added.

This past quarter, Olusanya spent a week sleeping on her friend’s couch in an on-campus apartment, simply to escape the mental and physical toll of public transit.

“I just physically couldn’t get up to go to the trolley and go back home,” she said. “I was just tired.”

From Stanford to CSU Los Angeles, UCSD is not alone in its parking crisis. Amid the overcrowding and over-admission at California universities, many are unable to keep up with the strain, especially those in dense urban areas like UCSD. This has created not just a crisis of physical space, but a crisis of independence, as on-campus students slowly lose access to the college towns they now call home.

I’m still unsure of what my school’s parking situation will look like next year, but I like to think that with any luck, the parking gods will smile down on us and Brenda will be allowed to stay in UCSD’s Pangea Parking Lot once again. 

Back will be the days of Costco grocery runs and day trips to the little town of Julian, and with them, the same independence that I tasted so briefly during my first year of college life.

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Abby Offenhauser, an aspiring attorney, is a second-year student at UC San Diego, majoring in literature and writing and minoring in Spanish language studies. She is the associate features editor for The UCSD Guardian and a member of EdSource’s California Student Journalism Corps.

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