As graduation and finals approach, the one detail students don’t want to think about is parking tickets.

Before students can leave campus, he or she has to pay their parking fines. For the average student, this is will cost $32.63 each year of their college career.

Parking is a problem because Iowa State has made the decision to keep this a pedestrian campus, said Doug Houghton, program manager for the Department of Public Safety. Tickets are a necessary punishment because the majority of the lots on campus are intended for people who have paid to have a parking permit.

“We write tickets because people choose to park in spaces they are not entitled to park [in], and the folks who pay fees in order to have those parking lots available to them are entitled to have their spaces,” he said.

The reason for parking tickets is simple.

“Primarily it serves as a deterrent to try to get people not to park there,” Houghton said. “It serves as an educational tool; getting a ticket does teach them where they can and cannot park. To some extent it does serve as a punishment – if you park illegally you pay for it.”

This educational tool comes with a hefty bill for some.

“Every year we have a couple of people who manage to run up over $1,000 worth of tickets,” Houghton said.

Places to avoid

The three most ticketed lots are also the biggest: Lot 61 at Towers Residence Halls, Lot 63 at Richardson Court Association and Lot 29 behind the Molecular Biology building.

However, this does not present an accurate picture of which lots are the biggest problems. In reality, when comparing the number of tickets issued to the number of stalls in the lot, the smaller lots closest to Central Campus present the largest problems.

Lot 49 behind Curtiss Hall only has 25 stalls and is in a very desirable location. So while the number of violations are not nearly the same as those found at the Towers lot, which has 1,000 stalls, it is considered one of the most problematic lots on campus for parking transgressions. The same goes for Lot 65 in front of Alumni Hall and Lot 59D at Friley/Helser Hall. Lot 45, next to Hamilton Hall, is also heavily abused, Houghton said.

Times to avoid

The hour of the day individuals are most likely to be cited for a parking violation is between 4 p.m. and 5 p.m.

Houghton said this is because it is the first time all day that a full contingent of parking attendants are working, issuing tickets. The majority of the tickets are written Monday through Thursday during the fall and spring semesters. Ticket citations drop during the summer.

Options for avoiding tickets

There are options for people driving to campus who do not have a parking permit. They can park at the Iowa State Center and ride the commuter bus to campus, find a metered parking stall or if they live outside the city of Ames, they can apply for a parking permit.

The lot behind the Molecular Biology building is used for commuter student parking, but there are only 600 stalls and there is currently a waiting list of more than 300 people.

However, people often choose to be a bit more creative.

“You would not believe how many people park on campus, get an old ticket out of their car, and slap it on their windshield,” said Deann Brainard, DPS parking officer and senior in child and family services.

The tricks don’t stop there, either.

“There are also people on campus that have figured out how to alter the permits,” she said. “Somebody figured out how to get the permanent marker that we use in the office off of the permit and change the date, but you could still slightly see what it was originally supposed to say. People have also figured out how to scan permits into scanners and make them look almost like ours.”

But whatever a student’s plan for avoiding tickets, there is one certainty. The parking situation is not going to change and tickets will continue to be written.

“I wish we could come up with another system,” Houghton said.

“I do not think anybody else in the country has come up with a better system, so it is probably as fair as it is going to get. The people who violate the rules pay the costs.”