University student Kalynn Michelli receives ticket for parking smart. Courtesy of University Police Department 

This semester students have had difficulty with the parking on main campus due to the ongoing construction. The Division for Student Affairs is rewarding students for adhering to the appropriate parking zones. 

“With the construction on campus, we have experienced some challenges with parking,” said Vice President for Student Affairs Dr. Eric Summers. “Students now have to park a little further out, and there’s limited parking on the interior of campus.”

Summers explained that the “Park Smart” initiative is a reward-based system intended to help students become accustomed to the changes in parking.

“With students who have to park in the garage, the lot by the technology building and also over in North Oaks Park, we want to do something positive to kind of encourage them to ‘Park Smart,’” said Summers. “So, for the students that are actually parking where they’re supposed to be parking, we have a parking patrol out giving them rewards.”

Some of the awards given out include gift cards for free burgers, a Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich or a free slice of pizza from Pizza Hut. Interim director of Transportation Services Gary Prescott, who oversees the department that will be distributing “Park Smart”  tickets, describes the purpose behind the award system. 

“The purpose of ‘Park Smart’ started as a communication plan to inform students of the changes in parking for the fall semester,” said Prescott. “With all of the construction happening at the start of the semester, we wanted to not only inform the students of the changes but also get them to think about parking before they even made it to campus. We knew parking would be challenging for the start of school, so we wanted to take a moment to reward the students who parked correctly even though it was a challenge.”

As parking improves on campus, Auxiliary Services and Campus Dining will continue to give out prizes. There has not yet been a date set for when the ‘Park Smart’ prizes will end, but Summers states that it will continue over the next few weeks.

“Park Smart” is there to help make the unenjoyable task of parking during construction a little less mundane and frustrating by offering rewards. Already, parking has begun to open up on campus and will continue to improve as the semester progresses. 

“Since the start of the semester the university has opened over 200 new parking spots to campus,” said Prescott. “130 new spots were added to North Texas lot for upper class zone 4 and 87 spots were added for freshmen in UC sections 5 and 7. We ask students to continue to pardon our progress as the construction continues and more parking spaces will become available as the semester progresses.”