PantherNOW Editorial Board
By the headline alone, we’re sure you already know what we’re about to say. But it’s worth mentioning again – parking is an issue at FIU.
From having too few spaces to inefficient Parking and Transportation practices, students at FIU deserve better parking, especially as a commuter school.
Last academic year, FIU had nearly 56,000 students enrolled. Out of those thousands of students, how many lived on campus?
According to a U.S. News report on colleges, only about six percent of the total student body.
That number was from 2021, but we’ll assume it’s about the same – in fact, we’ll even estimate it at 10 percent to account for the construction of Tamiami Hall and people coming back to campus after COVID.
Further, before jumping the gun, we’ll also consider the number of students who may be online only.
FIU’s Accountability Dashboard doesn’t say how many students are entirely virtual or in-person. FIU Online offers that 37,000 students take fully-online courses annually, but it doesn’t say how many of them are exclusively online. However, the Accountability Dashboard gives insight into broader numbers and breaks courses down by Student Credit Hours. For 2022-23, there were more in-person credit hours than online, with roughly 66,000 more hybrid hours.
Being very generous with the math, if we assume that the breakdown represents students either exclusively online or in-person (which it doesn’t; most students likely take a mix of the two), then there would still be far more students who need to be on-campus than those who don’t.
Once again, being very liberal with our math would mean that about 28,000 students have in-person classes and need to be on campus sometime during the week.
That number increases if you factor in hybrid classes. Realistically, most students are doing online and in-person courses – so probably far more than 28,000 students need parking spaces.
That number increases if you factor in hybrid classes. Realistically, most students are doing online and in-person courses – so probably far more than 28,000 students need parking spaces.
We’ll continue being charitable with our arithmetic and subtract the estimated 5,600 students who live on campus, assuming they don’t have cars (spoilers: plenty of them do, and thus, need parking).
According to a representative for Parking and Transportation, there are 13,205 student parking spaces at FIU – 2,900 at BBC and 1,800 at the Engineering Campus. We had to call because those numbers were not available online.
That leaves 8,505 spaces for 22,400 students – at minimum.
Obviously, students won’t need parking all day, every day. However, the number of students who need parking is far higher than 22,400.
As a university where most students live off-campus and drive to campus, FIU needs to prioritize solutions. As a previous letter to the editor pointed out, there are systemic problems with both FIU and the county’s transportation policy and planning.
It isn’t just an inconvenience – this problem with parking literally makes it difficult to attend class. And, as our editor pointed out long ago, their practices as the Parking and Transportation Department worsen an already bad situation.
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