For most college students, first learning to navigate campus may be a humbling experience. Out of so many buildings, there are only a few dotted across campus that a student must find at a given time. Once they learn how to navigate from class to class and understand the flow of traffic, students can settle into a routine for that year.

Eventually, however, many students progress through their freshman year and eventually decide to find housing off campus. There is one stipulation that comes with that: distance. The problem of distance is often solved by bringing a car to campus.

The addition of a car suddenly opens an entirely new perspective on navigating campus; student drivers may be outraged at their peers occupying crosswalks when, previously, they aggressively forged across a walkway without any thought for the stack of cars waiting to pass.

Unlike walking, the final and most important consideration in navigating campus with a car is where to park. Student demand for parking is high and oftentimes can be unmet, a problem that senators at the University of Iowa’s Undergraduate Student Government are taking into account.

Concerns about sufficient student parking have long been raised, and now Iowa’s Undergraduate Student Government is looking to provide parking vouchers for students during the busiest weeks of the semester. They also helped negotiate lower rates downtown.

Director of USG Governmental Relations Anna Amin said a conversation about lowering student rates began as Iowa City announced its plans to raise parking rates.

“We have a role in local government. Our city and deputy city leaders attend city council meetings and have a close working relationship with the counselors,” Amin said. “I said to our liaisons, ‘We should think of a way to factor students into this conversation.’”

After some negotiation with City Manager Geoff Fruin, an agreement was made to provide parking vouchers to students during dead week and finals week, she said.

“We had concerns about how this will financially impact students,” Amin said.

Amin said USG and the city has begun planning how this system would work. Ultimately, they settled on using USG funds to purchase subsidized parking passes for different city ramps, such as the ramp near The Graduate.

Similar to subsidies the city issued to shoppers when Dubuque Street was inaccessible, these passes would grant individual students three to four hours of free parking, she said, during dead week, which is the penultimate week of the semester, and finals week.

“You can study without having to bear the cost of a three, four-hour parking session, especially if you’re taking finals, which go late into the evening,” she said. “Which is especially problematic when it’s cold.”

Amin said the current phase is a test to gauge student demand. If there is sufficient demand, Amin says the program could be handed over to the university to create a long-term parking subsidy plan based on USG’s proposition.

“We can go to the university and say, ‘Well, we handed out 600 of these [passes],’” she said. “This is clearly a need for students on campus. Let’s institutionalize it.”

Currently, USG has set aside $3,000 of its budget for 600 passes for the end of this semester as part of its parking subsidy program, Amin said.

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Amin said parking has been an issue among students for years now. She said she has fielded questions about improving parking for students for years and that now USG’s plan might make it easier for some.

For the city, however, parking rates are necessary for cash flow and maintenance. In the current inflationary environment in the U.S. and worldwide, small matters like increasing parking rates only seem necessary to local officials.

Iowa City Transit Director Darian Nagle-Gamm said maintenance is a large factor behind increasing parking rates. Many ramps in downtown are reaching an age where frequent maintenance is necessary, she said.

“How do we support the maintenance and the ongoing provision of those parking services, both on the street and in our parking ramps?” she said.

Nagle-Gamm said increases in rates were necessary from a business perspective. The city had not raised rates for 11 years.

She said the funds must also go to the fare-free transit program and downtown janitorial workers who keep downtown spaces safe and clean.

Similarly, the UI has its own needs for its parking facilities. UI Parking and Transportation Director Debby Zumbach said that student demand for parking is almost impossible to satisfy.

“We’re a 17,000 space parking system,” she said. “If you think about that, there are over 30,000 students, and 25,000 employees, which isn’t counting patients and vendors and visitors.”

In the past, Zumbach said USG has approached her department to address the need for student parking. The demand for more spaces is difficult to meet, but the new ramp being built on the west side of campus is to help address that demand.

Zumbach said the UI parking rates are structured to remain light on students but still require enough profit to pay staff and perform maintenance. Additionally, some of the parking ramps are still being paid off, she said.

Students’ need for parking will not go away, but Amin is still content to put forth the effort to advocate for students in the short run.

“We’re really fortunate that we get a seat at the table for things like this, where we can say what students need and provide a program we came up with,” she said. “We worked it all out; just put money behind it and make it a part of the university.”