Chantel Brown has waited five years to be able to park near her office.

After four years of faculty parking in first-come, first-serve B-lots and another year in a different building’s specific C-lot, the assistant accounting manager of Sponsored Program Accounting finally qualified to park in the lot that belonged to her office at Thomas Boyd Hall after being waitlisted.

Brown considers the parking situation to be one of working at LSU’s biggest cons, especially for newer employees not used to daily pilgrimages in the Louisiana heat until they qualify for access to the C-lot named after the building they work in every day, which can take years in some cases.  

Brown’s experience with parking coincides with complaints levied against Parking and Transportation Services annually, especially as a new semester brings parking issues back to the forefront of the conversation.

In addition to undergraduate students, many staff, faculty members and graduate students feel as though their parking needs are repeatedly unaddressed, and the problem only seems to escalate. 

In 2021, the university had roughly 41,000 members of the campus community, including 1,360 faculty members, 3,821 staff members and 35,914 students, who shared approximately 23,000 parking spaces between themselves, according to Parking and Transportation Services.

Accounting for the university’s exponential growth over the last few years, there are likely more people competing for the same number of parking spaces as in 2021.

One main issue plaguing staff parking is the distinctions between the types of parking available. 

C-lot passes allow for clearance into specific gated lots closed off for all except a limited number of approved employees during campus’s busiest hours between 7:00 a.m. and 4:30 p.m.  If someone has C-lot access, they can reasonably leave campus and return without fear of not having a spot. 

B-lots function similarly to student commuter passes. 

This works, Brown said, if an employee plans to arrive on campus around 7:30 a.m. and not leave until they complete all their work. 

The competition and lack of flexibility for B-lots pushed Brown and her colleagues to apply for C-lots.

Another difference in the way these lots work is their cost. B-lot passes cost $275 annually, while C-lot parking costs $550 annually. 

According to Parking and Transportation Services, these numbers are comparably lower than that of other universities like the University of Houston, whose comparative passes cost twice as much as LSU’s.

Parking and Transportation also offers a Park and Geaux pass where users can shuttle from the Tiger Park East Lot to the Student Union.

“A big push has been to have people park using Park and Geaux. That’s just not going to work,” Brown said. “People don’t want to get here 15 minutes early for their job and have to ride a bus to get to your car. That’s an extra 30 minutes a day.”

Despite its solutions, Brown isn’t entirely sold on Parking and Transportation Services’ solutions, hoping to see improvements to the current parking scene, not just alternative solutions with ambiguous applications.

“I think they [Parking and Transportation Services] try, but I think it’s a mentality on campus that parking is always going to be an issue and that’s just how it is,” Brown said. 

Brown described her parking situation to be directly comparable to how parking was when she was an LSU student 30 years ago, believing improvements to parking have been negligible.

“It was you either get here early, or you park a mile away,” Brown said. “I don’t understand why, with as much as we’re paying, they can’t build parking garages that are more feasible in price.”

Working as an accounting analyst down the hall from Brown, Tanner Thibodeaux prefers B-lot parking over parking in a C-lot. When he started working at LSU around six months ago, he said that he wasn’t aware of the situation on campus, especially coming from Nicholls State University.

He was intimidated at first but said things turned around once he was able to get a B-lot pass. Thibodeaux usually arrives on campus and finds an open B-lot space before the morning rush hour and doesn’t usually need to leave campus before the afternoon.

“I think people might be confused on why it takes so long to get into certain lots,” Thibodeaux said. “Hearing a five year waitlist possibility just sounds completely ridiculous and almost seems unrealistic.”

Thibodeaux believes that the choice between a B-lot and C-lot should be made on an individual basis. He believes that the ease of mind and flexibility to leave for things like doctor’s appointments can definitely lend favor to C-lots for some staff and faculty like Brown.

The issue of finding adequate parking is not exclusive to staff members. Undergraduate and graduate students struggle to find parking in a free-for-all. 

Lyric Mandell is a mass communication graduate student who feels graduate students ride the line between an undergraduate student and a faculty member, especially within the realm of parking.

“I was really excited coming into being a doctoral student. Because I was teaching, I thought I’d be able to have faculty parking,” Mandell said. ”That’s not the case.”

When she can’t catch a ride from her younger sister, Mandell uses metered parking. She said that parking for her feels intimidating, time-consuming and expensive, and she opted out of buying a $182 commuter pass.

Mandell’s concerns match that of the average commuter: tight and competitive parking lots. 

But instead of just attending classes, she also has to teach them.

Gates blocking central campus cut off access and make getting dropped off more complicated, Mandell said.

Before Mandell arrived at LSU, she was a graduate student at the University of Houston, where graduate students taught classes in the afternoon and at night, and she didn’t have to worry about being restricted from their classes by gates like at LSU.

“Giving graduate students designated lots would definitely make the issue less strenuous for graduate students,” she said.

Director of Parking and Transportation Services Brian Favela recommends planning the commute every day and allotting extra time. He also recommends the ParkZen app, developed last year to provide real-time information on parking lots.

In addition, he said Parking and Transportation Services also records quarterly occupancy counts of parking lots throughout the day, which can be found on their website.

Favela also said he believes LSU’s approximately 23,000 available parking spaces are more than enough for operation on a normal school day.

Parking and Transportation Services also offers Tiger Trails buses as another alternative means of reaching campus and potentially avoiding the parking issue, Favela said.

He also recommends students, faculty and staff use the Park and Geaux program that shuttles users from the Tiger Park East Lot on Skip Bertman Drive to the Union. Park and Geaux passes cost $50 for students, staff and faculty.

“We’ve heard from students that there is not enough parking in denser areas on campus. We understand this issue and are committed to improving the parking and transportation experience for all our community members,” Favela said.