Parking Space crunch at Bannatyne
Absence of student parking to be addressed with new parkade
Joanna Bhaskaran, staff
For many students at the Bannatyne campus, getting a parking spot is a competitive sport. The Bannatyne campus, which houses the faculties of medicine and dentistry, currently has no parking spots allocated for students, and a waiting list for staff.
Currently, students can park in the Parkade, at a rate of $1 per hour, or $6 per day.
Garry Sran, UMSU president, reported in the last UMSU council meeting that the amount of single drivers to the Bannatyne campus has increased and that 18 faculty members were waiting to be allocated parking spaces at Bannatyne.
“There’s no question that parking at Bannatyne campus for students is non-existent,” Sran said. “There is quite a big parking problem and at the moment people are finding all sorts of temporary solutions like renting [space] from local homeowners to park in their back lanes or get it through the Health Sciences Centre.”
The university’s parking committee, which headed by Alan Simms, associate vice-president (administration), is looking into transportation management issues that include ensuring students get parking passes, increasing carpooling, and improving parking on both campuses. Simms says that the parking committee is also considering how shuttle buses can operate more effectively — currently a free shuttle travels between the Bannatyne and Fort Garry campuses every half hour. The committee is also working with Winnipeg Transit to provide better service to the universities.
According to Sran, the bus routes to the [which?] campus are not very good, the shuttle bus schedules are not convenient, and the Health Sciences Centre (HSC) area suffers from a lack of parking space for staff, patients, visitors, and students.
HSC plans to build a new 1,200-space parkade by late 2008 or early 2009.
“It is our hope that this parkade will help alleviate this space crunch, which is putting it mildly, because [parking] is definitely a problem that has been going on for quite a number of years,” said Andrea Edmond, director of parking for HSC.
A waiting list has already been created for the parkade, and some of the spaces have already been allocated.
