During the first week of classes of the Fall 2026 Semester, parking availability in Rollins Garage once again approached full capacity. Already a lingering concern in Fall 2025, students perceived the issue as further worsening at the beginning of the new academic year. According to Joshua Song (‘26), who occasionally returns to campus this fall, “The parking situation has gotten so much worse compared to last year… even mid-afternoon, when most classes are over, I can’t seem to find a spot.” Lucas Guillermo (‘28), a current commuter student, concurred that it is a “gamble” whether he can find parking on a given day, as his first class begins at noon.
Students’ parking difficulties were compounded during the first week of the fall semester, when an interim policy required first-year students to park at the Valencia College lot. On Friday, Aug. 28th, Campus Safety revised the policy and returned first-year students to the top floor of Truist Garage. The department announced in an email to students: “Beginning immediately, all first-year students with vehicles, including residential students, commuters, and approved parking appeals, must park on the top level of the Truist Garage (excluding the ramp).”
Campus Safety’s policy change came following a week of data collection regarding filled and vacant spaces across campus. Unlike last year, according to Assistant Vice President of Public Safety Ken Miller, the source of the “challenge right now is not total numbers; it’s that parking is unbalanced. Students like to use the Rollins Garage more than the Truist Garage.” He notes that during the first week, while students made rounds of the Rollins Garage to find an empty space, there were dozens of empty spaces on the top two floors of Truist, and “even the Sutton lot has had 20-30 empty spaces.”
Changes in the density of housing have affected where students park on campus, particularly in Sutton Apartments. Apartments in the building hosted up to five students each in recent years when the building was at peak capacity. Now that Sutton hosts about 250 students, “we have more spaces than vehicles for residents.” As for the Sutton lot, which has traditionally been reserved for students, Miller notes that he is “actually outsourcing it now.” On the other hand, “275 students in the new East End Neighborhood and nearly 500 in Lakeside Lodge have concentrated much of Rollins’ remaining residential community in a small area.”
The challenges of parking during the previous academic year played a role in Campus Safety’s planning for the new dynamic following the construction of East End Neighborhood. As construction neared completion during the spring, Miller says that the department “was trying to look forward. We didn’t want a repeat of the convergence of sources of parking demand that took place last year.” One factor that gives Campus Safety optimism, once parking demand balances across the various garages, is the smaller size of the freshman class compared to the senior class that graduated in the spring.
However, an increase in residential students as a proportion of the total student body has complicated Campus Safety’s math. Therefore, the extent of the parking load has not been clear to the department until the year started. Miller recalls that “in May, we were starting the conversation about not having first-year students bring cars onto campus. I thought we could at first limit the Valencia lot to those who had medical issues, jobs off-campus, etc. Trying to work with Admissions and first-year students as much as we could, we decided to allocate the Valencia lot to first-year students.”
Miller believes the car counts from the Valencia lot can be transferred to the Truist Garage. “We have 230 spaces on the top level of Truist, and 150 first-years we’ve sold decals to.” He hopes that moving students’ cars to the Truist Garage will in fact be convenient for those who live on the western side of campus.
He summarized his view of parking on campus with a brief comment: “Students have enough challenges; I don’t want parking to be another one.”
Comments are closed.