SGA Advocacy Report
A Proposal For Accessible, Sensible, User-Centered Parking Regulations
SGA’s landmark advocacy report on the rules and regulations that govern parking on-campus at Georgia Tech is now publicly available. Click the cover page or link below to access the full report.
In the included report, we detail a series of seven issues that we’ve found to be central to the woes regarding parking, review relevant data and a case study, and conclude with actionable, short-term recommendations that Parking & Transportation Services can take immediately to ameliorate the issues we’ve raised.
Our Advocacy Focus
Here’s the deal. We think parking enforcement is a necessary function of keeping our campus open to all.
Now that might sound wacky, but hear us out.
Without some level of parking enforcement on campus, the incentive disappears for individuals to not park in places like ADA spaces, construction zones, and other parking areas that keep campus welcoming and accessible. The core frustration with parking doesn’t originate with the enforcement of parking rules. It’s the rules and regulations that govern parking enforcement that result in the vast majority of issues that arise from parking on-campus.
These aren’t rules imposed by the State of Georgia or the City of Atlanta or the Board of Regents. These are Georgia Tech’s own rules. These are rules that we’ve imposed on ourselves, and they are rules that we can change.
It is our hope that these findings can be used to improve the accessibility of parking rules, modify procedures to be more sensible, and drive changes that are user-centered. But why is this something SGA is taking on?
For many students, staff and faculty, parking is the first and last experience they have with Georgia Tech each and every day. SGA has received complaints for a number of years about parking on-campus and we want to help improve the parking experience and lessen the burden that is placed on GT community members to decipher the do’s and don’ts of parking on-campus.
Throughout the course of this report, we detail the data behind parking enforcement at Tech, walk through a key example that demonstrates the core issue with parking rules, and provide a series of actionable recommendations that Parking & Transportation Services (PTS) can take to address the issues we’re raising.
There is no panacea for the issues concerning parking, but at some point in time, we need to stop talking and start doing.
Now is the time when we begin the latter.