For Sara Nowen and her roommate, off-campus parking is routine.

Every day, like clockwork, they move their car from one side of the street to the other to comply with the even/odd day parking restrictions placed by the city of Syracuse.

The routine, however, is burning up many students living off-campus. On Aug. 31, many students went out and dutifully moved their cars. When the parking officer made his rounds on Sept. 1, nearly everyone got a ticket for being on the wrong side of the street, Nowen said, including herself before she convinced the officer to tear up the ticket.

‘I told him that I didn’t realize it was two odd days in a row,’ recalled Nowen, a senior illustration major who lives on Ackerman Avenue. ‘He was pretty forgiving about it because it was the first of the month. I was pretty fortunate.’

Nowen may have escaped, but Syracuse Police usually give out about 100 parking tickets each day in and around the university area, said Lt. Shannon Trice, with the Syracuse Police department.

The tickets, Trice said, usually occur for reasons such as parking on the wrong side of the street and double parking, to stopping too close to a corner or a fire hydrant. These tickets range in price from $20 to $35 – values that quickly add up to millions of dollars of revenue for the city.

And because many students in off-campus houses have more cars than parking spaces available, the university area is a high-ticket zone.

‘There’s definitely a parking problem up in the university area,’ Trice said. ‘There are too many cars for the neighborhood. They’ve been dealing with this since the university started there.’

This overflow of cars has led to frustration among some students, who say the parking restrictions are excessive. Students with fire hydrants in front of their houses sometimes get shut out of local parking, as do students with no driveway or parking spaces at the side of their house. And everyone experiences problems when things get crowded.

‘On weekends, it’s a hike,’ said Jenn Winters, a junior business major at Le Moyne College who lives along Ackerman. ‘When there are SU football games, it is ridiculous.’

The police usually make their rounds at about 7 to 7:30 p.m. down Ackerman, ticketing all cars that have not crossed to the other side of the street, Nowen said.

‘The majority of the people have to park on the road, and the cops just roll down the street writing tickets,’ said Kevin Morgese, a fifth-year landscape architecture major at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, who lives off Ackerman. ‘You can drive down the street every morning and see the tickets on the windshield.’

To help encourage students to obey traffic laws, the police sometimes rely on more severe measures. About 10 times a year or so, the police will perform ticket-and-tow details, where they haul offending vehicles, sending a message to students that police are serious about traffic law enforcement.

‘You see a much higher compliance rate after we do a ticket-and-tow operation,’ Trice said. ‘(After the operation) we try to help them get their car back and try to help educate them with the traffic laws.’

The operation usually lowers the amount of traffic offenses for a couple of weeks, Trice said, and then students start breaking the same laws again, which means police must spend more time writing tickets and less time performing other duties.

‘We would like to see everyone parking legally,’ Trice said. ‘If everyone were parking legally, we could get about other business. There’s a lot of work for us to do and all we’re asking for is some compliance.’

But some students questioned whether some of the parking policies simply end up clogging the roads more.

‘The whole odd and even days on either side of the street just doesn’t work,’ said Ricky Huggins, a sophomore forest engineering major at SUNY-ESF. ‘Around four every day you can’t get through because there are cars on either side.’

But most students said the pain involved with parking gradually dissipates through the year as regulations become ingrained in students’ daily lives.

‘It’s not that difficult,’ said Jeff Norton, a senior management major at Le Moyne College. ‘As long as you’re conscious of what day it is, it’s pretty easy to avoid a ticket.’

Published on September 12, 2004 at 12:00 pm