The University of Connecticut Parking Services plans to develop a parking garage with spaces for students on the south side of campus by June 2027.
“It’d be the first time that we’d have resident students in a garage, but that’s where the need is,” said Andy Kelly, the associate director of logistics at UConn.
According to Kelly, the proposed parking plan is anticipated to be in one of two locations: behind John Buckley Residence Hall in Downtown Storrs or behind UConn Fine Arts Complex, taking the space of Lot R.
Students on the south side of campus said they struggle to find adequate parking in the area. A fifth-semester nursing student, Jessica Link, must go off campus twice a week from 5 a.m. to 5 p.m. for clinicals as part of a course requirement.
“If there is no parking spot in the closest lot A or D and say I have to park in either Hilltop or Towers, I’m making that walk at 5 a.m.,” said Link.
She lives in Anna M. Snow Residence Hall, which is a 19-minute, one-mile walk to Hilltop Community Center Apartments.
According to the Parking Services website, students who have the credit requirement of 54 or more credits and are on-campus residents get a parking permit with the classification of resident lots. These lots include A, D, T, W and Hilltop Apartments (where designated).
“You really can only park in D-Lot Friday night into Saturday night. Past that, best of luck finding parking there,” said Jack Smith, a fifth-semester engineering physics major at UConn who lives on the south part of campus.
The next closest parking spots for students on the south side of campus are in the Hilltop Apartments, but students said that poses another issue.
“In Hilltop, the parking spots closest to the entrance, you can park after five, but the signage is confusing,” said Justin Padelli, a seventh-semester accounting major who is a commuter student at UConn.
When Kelly was asked about the possibility of more signs being installed in Hilltop Apartments due to students’ confusion, he said, “The number of signs it would take to meet that desire is not worth the investment.”
Due to some confusion and difficulty finding close parking spots, many students park in areas that their permit does not allow. This leads to citations. According to WTNH Channel 8, more than 41,500 citations resulted in more than $1 million in revenue from students during the 2024-2025 academic school year.
As of July 31, Parking Services has implemented a smart boot to cut down on the students who refuse to pay their high citation fees. Parking Services scans the license plates of student vehicles, and once they detect a vehicle has more than $200 in parking citations, they confirm before putting the smart boot on the vehicle with a sticker for instructions on how to remove it.
Kelly said that they have been working on a solution to this problem for the past three years and were finally able to get a contract with the smart boot technology. He said it has already decreased repeat offenders.
The smart boot has a combination code on it that, once the student has paid their amount in full on parking citations, they will get the combination to the code to unlock the boot.
Another issue Parking Services has to consider is the increase in student population as Storrs continues to accept more students on campus.
According to The Daily Campus, the class of 2029 contained 4,715 students in addition to 760 transfer students. This is a record high number of students on campus.
“As the student enrollment goes up, because there is a set number of beds on campus, it’s only the commuter parking that has the potential to go beyond our capacity,” said Kelly.
The Standard at Four Corners, a recent development of off-campus housing apartments, created a new challenge, according to Kelly.
“First week of class, we had people parking on the grass of W-Lot,” said Kelly, which is something that they had never seen before. He attributed this increased traffic to the lack of parking spots offered by The Standard at Four Corners apartments.
“Last year it was a 15-minute drive, then I’d get to campus, park my car at the W-Lot, and that’s another 15-minute walk or bus ride to get to the school of business,” said Padelli.
Kelly said the parking garage will hopefully solve this issue by providing spots to on-campus residents so that commuters can have spaces closer to campus.
“If I do my job right, the extra capacity is always going to be in the furthest lots out,” said Kelly.