A committee with the Iowa State Transportation Advisory Council is seeking input on campus parking and transportation problems.

Members of the General Review of Transportation, Parking and Enforcement committee are circulating an inquiry to allow students, faculty, staff and visitors to give input on problems associated with campus transportation, parking and enforcement.

Jim Hutter, associate professor of political science, said he is forwarding e-mail to various people in the ISU community, but he is having trouble reaching students.

Faculty and staff have systems for forwarding e-mail through departments, but students, he said, are harder to reach.

“The biggest breakdown is the student body. There is no system, that I am aware of, that we can forward e-mail to students who have e-mail,” he said.

Students and others, he said, can give input to the inquiry on the ISU Homepage at http:www.iastate.edu/news/issues/parking.html.

Transportation Advisory Council Chairman James Gaunt, a professor of civil engineering, said members of the council were interested in doing some rethinking of transportation and parking issues.

“We are looking for new people coming up with new ideas we never thought of,” he said.

In addition, the members of the council, Hutter said, are conducting the inquiry, in part, as a response to the results of a parking study conducted last year which proposed ideas for parking on campus.

Among the ideas were a plan for shuttle buses for off-campus faculty parking and locations for an on-campus parking ramp were included.

Hutter said the parking inquiry is a means to “solve an itch that needs scratching today.”

Students agree there is a parking problem.

Sarah Jo Messenger, a senior in zoology, said the parking tickets are unreasonably costly. “They’re just too expensive. You park at a 30-minute loading zone and you get a $12 ticket.”

Messenger said she usually rides Cy-Ride to get to school, but she said the university needs more spots for quick drop-offs. “Parking does suck, and it’s hard to find a place when you need to run into the library.”

She said the all-hours, all-days parking for vendor spots was “ridiculous” since vendors don’t use the spots after hours.

Hutter, who is taking suggestions through his e-mail at [email protected], encouraged people who receive copies of the inquiry, on paper or by e-mail, to make copies or forward the inquiry to others.

“Do it in such way so you can fill it out again and again and again, give it to your friends. If you get an e-mail of it, forward it,” he said.