Park, Here?

The new parking sticker design – the gold university logo on a pink octagon – is downright ugly! See bottom picture. Why can’t they just use the old design? The previous 2004-2006 sticker, in the middle, was a simple and discreet silver rectangle. Even the yellow square 2002-2004 sticker on top looks nice. This new one simply looks cheap and loud.

While we’re at it, let me rant a bit about the parking situation on campus.

The main campus ground was designed as a walking campus: the Sultan Haji Ahmad Shah mosque in the middle is surrounded by administrative and academic buildings, encircled by a two-lane street. Residential colleges and sports facilities make up the outer layer. Since full-time students are guaranteed housing, parking space is limited, but enough to cater for commuting staff, non-resident part-time students and visitors. The campus is served by RapidKL and Putra LRT feeder buses, so resident students really have no need for private transport.

Still, many students keep a motorcycle or a car on campus. I had no problem walking around campus on foot and taking the bus to KL as a student, but these people need to take the car just to get their asses from the hostel to class. So, we have a shortage of parking spaces. In response to this, as well as increasing number of traffic accidents, the university authorities turned the road that circles the campus into a one-way street, and introduced road-side parking along certain stretches.

Both are hardly solutions to the original problem - congestion. Resident students should not have any need for a car or motorcycle in the first place, and if left unchecked the number of cars and motorcyles are only going to increase. Even now, students are beginning to encroach into staff parking areas.

The limited parking spaces need to be rationed out. We begin by registering all the parking spaces in the university. Staff members would then be assigned their own parking spaces. Saving a few spaces for visitors and non-resident part-time students, the rest of the parking spaces would then be auctioned off. We may even allow a secondary market for parking permits, which would make an interesting study in itself. This would go a long way to solving the congestion problem efficiently though a market mechanism. On top of it, the university would also make some extra cash!