By Josh Siatkowski | Staff Writer
Long presented with the options of a year-long pass or none at all, Baylor students have, for now, been given a new parking solution.
The 135-spot parking lot on the corner of 5th Street and Bagby Avenue has been temporarily converted to Baylor’s first daily pass lot. For $5 a day, students can buy a full-day pass to the lot on the southeast corner of campus.
While the new initiative has been received well by students using the lot, the arrangements are not permanent. The lot — which Seventh and James Baptist Church recently sold to a housing developer — will be removed to begin construction of a student living complex around April 1.
In the first weeks of the new daily pass’s expected 3-month life, it’s been quietly marketed, with just a webpage and a few A-frames around the parking lot. As of 10 a.m. Thursday, only about 35 passes had been sold for the day. But that limited knowledge has been part of the plan, Director of Parking Services Matt Penney said.
“The lot has about 135 spaces, and you might be like, ‘Oh, that’s a lot,’” Penney said. “Well, when you think about 20,000 students, that’s not a lot. And so we don’t want to crush wherever we turn into a day-pass situation.”
As one of the relatively few students who currently use it, Aspen, Colo., junior Ella Zane said the lot is a creative solution to the challenge of parking on campus.
“I think it’s a great idea,” Zane said. “The [full-year] parking passes sell out so fast. It’s true that a lot of people don’t get the opportunity to get them, and then everyone’s crowding the streets. It creates more traffic, and so this is a good opportunity for Baylor to make some money and for kids to park places.”
With most full-year parking passes costing around $400, it would take 80 single-day passes to equal that amount. Zane called the $5 price point a fair deal and said she plans to use the lot until April, as long as spots stay available.
“It’s better than a parking ticket for a day,” she said.
Parking Services has long thought about implementing a daily pass. But with the lot by Seventh and James Baptist Church recently changing hands, it had an opportunity to give the idea a try.
“[Baylor] had an agreement with Seventh and James Church,” Penney said. “They actually own the parking lot, and we’ve had an agreement for decades and decades that Baylor uses it on class days for our students. Seventh and James Church has sold a large portion of their property, and it’ll impact their entire parking lot, and that will take place in April.”
With the lot’s April destruction, Parking Services had to get creative in selling passes.
“We couldn’t sell a [full-year] permit, so in the fall, we sold a fall-only permit,” Penney said. “And this semester, we didn’t want to sell a spring permit and have a student get right up until the important part, finals, and be like, ‘Hey, we know you have your habits, but we want to break them.’ So we were like, ‘What can we do with the lot?’ We’ve been wanting to try a day permit on campus for a while, and this gave us the first opportunity to.”
Once the housing complex breaks ground, that might not mark the end of daily parking passes at Baylor. While no plans are confirmed, Penney discussed the idea of selling half-day parking passes for Speight Garage in the afternoons, which is full with year-long pass holders in the morning, but clears up by around 2 p.m.
Students can purchase a day pass to Lot 30 each morning using Baylor Parking’s website. If passes are sold out for the day, students can park at the Ferrell Center and take the free campus shuttle.
