Parking lot blues
Students have a difficult time registering for parking spaces
ROMER BAUTISTA, STAFF
PHOTO BY WARREN BRITTON.
U of M students who made an attempt to register for student parking passes on July 19 were disappointed to find out that the new registration system implemented by the university’s parking services had failed.
“The new software applications failed to meet our expectations because of the huge volume of hits that the system received,” said Patricia Reid, director of ancillary services and part of the team that decided upon the new registration system.
Students spent hours trying to navigate the registration system, only to be met with frozen web pages and timed-out Internet sessions. After a few hours the entire system was shut down until further notice.
Parking services scrambled for the next 24 hours, attempting to work out the problems, but a second attempt CHIEFto launch the sale of parking spaces on July 20 was met with the same results as the day before. The failed attempts forced parking services to create a new registration system, and forced at least one U of M student into making a Facebook group to vent his frustrations with the system.
“After sitting at the computer for a couple hours refreshing my browser, I realized that there are probably a thousand other students who were as frustrated as me,” said Rob MacEachern, managing editor of the Manitoban, and creator of the Facebook group “U of M Parking Sucks,” explaining why he started the group.
Parking services, along with the ancillary services department put together a new registration system that would be able to handle the hundreds of hits that it was now expecting. They opened the new registration system on July 25, and the system was able to launch without a hitch. Within hours, all the parking spaces were claimed.
“There were 1,000 people hitting the system in the first 45 seconds,” explained Reid.
The new system called for students to log into their JUMP account and fill out a web form, where they had to enter an e-mail address, a license plate, their top three parking lot choices, and declare whether they were a commuter student or a resident student. Staff at parking services then had to read each of the submitted forms, and manually enter the parking requests based on when each form was received.
“Then they e-mailed you on Aug. 3, telling you which of your choices you received,” MacEachern said.
Based on member comments on the Facebook group, the L lot was the most requested lot, with some members claiming that they didn’t get that choice even after submitting their web form just minutes after the system opened.
“We now have a waiting list for spaces in the U lot,” said Reid.
When asked how the student parking registration system will work next year, Reid said that they are hoping to use an improved version of the system that caused all the headaches in the first place this year. “We’re going to be working on it all year, until we are able to improve [the volume of hits the software can handle].”
This was the first year Parking Services used an online registration system for student parking. Prior to online registration, parking passes were sold through a telephone registration system.
“We could no longer offer telephone registration because of the decommission of the U of M mainframe,” Reid said. The university’s mainframe computer was disconnected in December 2006 with the implementation of the Aurora system.
Parking Services was unavailable for comment at press time.
