 Welcome to our you are home live tour of transit and parking. My name is Channing and I will be the host today. I am a senior communication major and I am from Springville, Arkansas, which is right next door to Fayetteville. So if you guys have any questions about transit or parking today, please comment those throughout the video. And also today we are lucky enough to have someone from transit and parking join us. So we have David Wilson here with us today. Hi David. I am David Wilson. I am the communications director here at Transit and Parking. And if you don't know where we are located, we are exactly right across Razorback Road from Bud Walton Arena. Actually I am looking at Bud Walton Arena right now. Yeah, let's pan over there and take a look at it. And you can see, that will give you a good vantage point. If you need to do any business with us at Transit and Parking, you can do that online. Or you can call us. But some people want to come in so that is where we are. You can see a parking lot across the way that is being renovated even as we speak. That is going to be a good spot in the coming school year for those who want to park and ride because Razorback Transit buses will come through there. They will pick you up and they will take you to the heart of campus. At this point I think we are going to go inside. Sounds good. We are going to show you in there. We have got about 8 people tuning in. Let us know where you are from. And what day or maybe you are moving to campus if you are. Alright. So we are heading to the, what is this building called David? It is an administrative building. It also houses UAPD and it has tech support upstairs but we are on the first floor and we are going there now. So technology, parking and the police. Hey, oh thank you very much, I appreciate it. Beth is chiming in from Mansfield, Texas. Awesome. Glad to have you Beth. If you come in to do business here you can go to the front counter. That is where most people can take care of whatever they need. But today we are going to go inside to our conference room so we will come this way. There is the front counter area. And David, I think we have seen a couple of people wearing the vests, those yellow vests. Are those parking? Wearing the yellow vests? Some to be parking. Okay. Where are those? But we have so much construction on campus. Sure. But they come in here and do business with them too. Okay. We are going to go back this way. We are back in the back of parking. Behind the scenes parking. Most people never get to see this part of our operation. Right. Right. And you know, it is parking is one side but you guys also do transit. So buses and everything like that. And their offices are separate from this one. We have so much goes into it behind the scenes, people don't always realize that. We are going to go into our conference room here and settle in for a bit. In this conference room, we have a lot of meetings and training sessions and some decisions are made behind the scenes. I will point out that we don't make all of the decisions on campus. It has to be approved by a committee, the traffic parking and transit committee. And they are made up of people who are not in this department. So that's a good thing. We have a little bit of influence from a lot of people that aren't working here. A lot of people do work on campus though so they have a vested interest in trying to make the best decisions they need around this conference table every month or so. Okay. So they make some important decisions that affect all of us. Patrice is chiming in from Fort Worth and we have Paula Dunn from South Lake, Texas. So we got quite a few people tuned in. That's great. Excellent. Okay. Well, yeah. Can you tell us a little bit about when it comes to parking like, how is it even divided? Are there colors or names or what kind of parkings did you even offer? Well, I always tell people at orientation, if you want a parking permit, it depends on how much you want to spend and how close you need to be to where you're working or to where your residence hall is. And I can show you on the map. Yeah. Let's take a look. Right here. Of course, this is all available online. If you go to our website parking.urk.edu, this map is updated all of the time and so the latest version is always online. But basically, we get asked by students a lot about the red resident reserve. Sure. You can see the red shaded areas. Those are the ones that are, they're highly sought after. They're the most expensive too. And students pay to park in that area so that they can be, you know, very close to their residence hall. And that's a big intersection between our area of housing and parking's areas, resident reserve, because those are reserved for residents. Absolutely. And we have to work, you know, you and I know this, but everybody's viewing doesn't know it. We have to work so close with housing on a lot of this because we have to coordinate our efforts to make sure everybody has what they need. Oh, and if you're waiting for, on the waiting list for resident reserve, we just updated on movein.urk.edu, the latest numbers of resident reserve waiting list numbers from parking. So thank you for those numbers. And speaking of move in that's coming right up, that is a big, big weekend. We applaud housing for what they put together. They even, could I mention your app, because I got it right here, movein.urk.edu. Yeah, a website, so they can find. You can look at that, it's got a ton of information that you'd want to look at before you, before you arrive to campus. That's for newcomers in particular. But these shaded areas, of course, the blue is reserved. Students do not get that. That's for employees who want to park close to where they're working. The yellow is for faculty and staff. You can see we've got a lot of people that work at the university. We do. So they all have to park there. And here's an interesting bit of trivia. Employees here pay for parking too, just like students and. What? I will add that even people who work for transit and parking, we pay for our. Have to pay for your own parking. Yes, we have to abide by all of the rules that are in place, just like they are for everyone. As a staff member, I can testify to that. I have taken on my paycheck every month. The vast majority of the parking area on campus is the green shaded area. This is the standard green student permit. So we have a lot of students. That's only about $101 per permit for the entire year. That's very affordable as the prices for those things go. Yeah. And a lot of students do that because that's all they need. The biggest bargain we have is down in this area on our map. This is the remote parking, it's south of the main campus. It's only about $25.70 for the whole year. You can park there with that permit. Some students do that, especially people who commute. If you're going to get on a bus and ride somewhere anyway, you might as well just pay for a cheap permit and then get on the bus. And it'll take you right to the heart of campus. So we're glad to have that. Now all together, if you had all of the garages, all of the parking areas, all throughout campus, we have 14,000 spaces to park. More than 14,000. David, we have a question that came in from Michelle. She's asking about her specific daughter. I know we can't necessarily get into that situation right here. But what she does ask is they wanted resident reserved for the Adohi area. That particular parking lot may not be open at the beginning school year. So they took a parking garage pass instead. I'm curious, how does that work with like, I think they're given options. You can take a parking garage or you go on the waiting list for resident reserved. There's two different waiting lists. And of course, one I know you're aware of is through housing, the resident reserved parking. You get on the waiting list for that. And we go down the list, we work our way through the list. And the ones obviously at the top of the list, they are going to be approached first about do they want to buy that permit. The garage list works the same way, except it's not coordinated through housing. We accumulate that list by those who are interested. And we keep that list. And when we go through that to offer permits to people who want them, it's just a first come, first serve basis. So you can be on both lists, and a lot of families are. But you have to make a decision. At some point, if you're offered the garage, then you're committed to the garage. Or if you're offered the, I shouldn't say if you're offered that. If you accept that offer, you're committed to the garage. If you accept an office offer for the resident reserved, then you're committed to that. You can't just switch to a garage after that. But usually you're going to know by the time you get an offer where you really need to be or want to be. If someone didn't know if they were on resident reserved or not, who would they call to find out if they were on a resident reserved waiting list? You can call our office anytime in the regular business hours, 575 Park, P-A-R-K, you can ask to speak to someone about where you are on the list. At this point, we've worked through much of that process. I don't want to say that if you don't have an offer yet, you won't get one. But at this stage in the summer, a lot of times we have worked through a lot of that. A lot of the offers have been filled. So I can't speak to anybody individually as to what they're going to get to. As to call in if they have individual questions about their situation. Okay, fantastic. Well, did we? Yeah. So we have a few questions that got asked in our social media the past couple of days. So do you mind answering those for us? That'd be great. That'd be great. So the first question is from Amy. And she asked, my friend was moved from Pomfret to Reed. Does her parking go with her? Okay, I have to kind of answer that. I have to kind of qualify the answer to that because when they say does your parking go with you, I'm assuming they mean resident reserve parking. If that's the case, and this is something that's rare this year where we've had some people move from one residence to the other because of the decision that was made. We're not going to have someone pay for resident reserve parking and have to park across campus. If you do get resident reserve, it's going to be in the particular zone where you're going to be living. So they're making adjustments for that even as we speak. I know earlier this week, one person in our office was working on that because we just found out that we were having some students living in a different area. So we're not going to make something inconvenient for a person. Now, if you're talking about a standard green permit that won't change. If you have that permit, you park wherever you find the space in those lots. And that is true no matter what residence hall that you might be living in. Sure. We have one more question come in as we were talking. This is from Aline, and is asking about the Adohi specifically because Adohi's resident reserve maybe wasn't going to be ready at the time. I would say, Aline, probably the best thing is to call parking specifically about that to get the answer. But I don't know if you have anything additional to add to the Adohi. You can call on that at this time, but they may not be able to tell you anything more specific than what I'm about to say. What we have been told is that the parking across the road from Adohi, and that would be to the east of the new residence halls. That's not ready yet. It's not going to be ready. We were told about October, it would be ready. But with construction crews and contractors and deadlines and so on, that's not a guarantee. All we know is we're not going to start the year with that. That doesn't mean you don't have a place to park. They are working on assigning people who are in Adohi to the same zone, but in a different red shaded area. Now, how many numbers we're talking about there, I can't answer that, but they're working on it even as we speak. There are some who are going to be in Adohi who need to park in a green shaded area anyway. And some are going to do that by choice. Some students just say, I don't want to pay that much money for parking. I'm fine paying $101 or whatever. And then they park wherever they can in a green shaded area. So that's the latest that we have on that. In an ideal situation, we'd like to start the year with all of the parking open, but some things are beyond our control on that. So that's a good question. Yeah, yeah, thank you. One more question from the feed here. Jane asks, are lots 56D and B on Leroy Pond Drive general student parking? And I think the map would tell us. The map indicates that. Yeah, I encourage everybody to look at the map online because it is updated. But you're talking about these areas. And there are symbols on the maps that tell, that designates something different. For instance, if there's a box around the number, that indicates that you can't park there overnight. There's the legend right there. Yes, the legend certainly helps you with that. But there are certain lots, for instance, that you don't want to leave your vehicle there overnight. And usually the reason for that is that is an area that has our bus traffic in the morning, a lot of commuters will park there just to catch a bus. And if the lot's already full, they can't do that. So there's a reason for every requirement that's out there. But lot 56 is very spacious, and a lot of people like to use it. But 56B and 56D, you can use that too. But you also need to remember that we have a lot of people that work here. And if they have, for instance, a yellow parking permit, that grants them access to a green area as well. So some employees use that. And they have a right to it because they paid for a permit just like anyone else. Wealth information. Thank you, thank you for that. Yeah, what other questions we have come in from our Instagram question? Yeah, so our next question is from Whitney. And she asked, where do we park after moving in on August 15? Okay, that information is going to come from housing. One thing we're glad to report is that there is an article coming out very soon on Arkansas Newswire. A lot of our staff and faculty read that every day to see what's going on on campus. It's our campus newspaper, sort of. It is, it is. And we encourage the incoming students to look at that too. That article, I think it's going to be Monday now that it'll be online. I think it'll be about Monday, yeah. If you look at that, it's going to give you the rundown of where you can park. But also the link that I mentioned earlier about move in will have that information. Specifically, it's hard to answer the question because it depends on what residence hall you're going to move into as to where you may want to park your vehicle after the move in and also where your parents can put their vehicle for a little while after the move in. But we have made space available in some of the parking garages. Do you mind saying which one specifically? Garland Garage, which is on the north part of campus. A lot of you are familiar with that if you went to orientation. There are some levels, and again, that's going to be provided in the link and in the article that I referenced. The Harmon Garage, a bit of trivia, that's the largest parking garage in the entire state of Arkansas, more than 2,000 spaces. We'll have some room for parents who want to use that during that time of transition when they're helping a family member move in. So those will be available as well as the green areas that we looked at on the map earlier. We try to be real flexible during that time because it is a lot of people on campus trying to move in. But yeah, if you're patient, you'll find the spot that you need to be in and then take care of business and then you can leave in campus kind of feeling good about everything being resolved. Sure. Michelle makes a comment about having not received any info yet from housing. And I'll say that we are probably sending emails to you or your students. So we're sending them to student emails. We also have park arrival passes that will be arriving provided we had your address during the time that you were choosing arrival times. So that's coming in the mail very soon, either physical mail or most of our communication is through your atuart.edu email. Yeah. As a student, you'll find out so be sure to check that out. She said that she bought a parking permit for Garland parking garage and she was wondering when she can pick that up. Today would be fine. What was that? Today. She can pick it up today. Really, the sooner the better. But I'm kidding when I say today, but if you were here today and wanted to pick it up, you could. So what I would do for any student coming to campus with that question or something similar, I would get that permit and pick it up as soon as I could. That's for garages and resident reserved and so on. Now, let me mention this because it won't apply to everyone, but it will apply to some. If you have ordered online a green student permit, we automatically mail that to the address in your file and for a lot of students, that's an address that's away from the university. It's back home. So you'll want to make sure and get that before you out of the mail before you come to campus. We have had students in the past. They show up to campus. They have no permit. It's actually literally in the mail and it goes back to their house. So you want to, that's one reason why you don't want to wait until the last minute to try to secure a green permit online. You want to take care of that promptly. But if that does happen, if you're one of those students who get kind of caught in between your permit is back home with mom and dad, but you're here, of course they can mail it to you and you'll have it. You can see us and get a temporary plan out in the meantime and just show that and you're still good to go. Very helpful. And you mentioned getting your parking pass as soon as you arrive on campus. Campus card, your student card is a really important one too. What about, not student card, what is it called? Student ID. Student ID. Yes, your student ID. Campus card office. Very important thing to get as soon as you arrive if you don't already have it. I think if she needs a pass for move-in day, she's moving in on August 12th. Janosa early arrival. It is an early move-in. It shouldn't be any problem. We don't have passes just for parking on move-in days because that's as mentioned all orchestrated through housing, but here again what we just mentioned a minute ago, if you get on campus you have made arrangements to have a particular type of permit, I'd go ahead and get it. That way you would have it and you can begin using it right away. But in this case, like in every day on campus at the university, always make sure that you're not parked somewhere, that your permit doesn't allow you access. When we looked at the map earlier, you might have remembered seeing the blue shaded areas. That's reserved for faculty and staff and they pay extra for those spots. If you have a green permit, you're not supposed to be in there because actually they paid to be there. So that's why we have to enforce parking for different reasons is to make sure everybody has access to the parking that they paid to have. For your part, if you're a returning student or if you're a brand new student, we always just ask you to make sure that you know where you can legally park because we really don't want you to have a citation and if everybody parked illegally, you could imagine that it might be chaotic. Chaos, it would be chaotic. All right, well we got a lot of good questions and some questions that we got from Instagram earlier, we appreciate all that. What other things we want to talk about when it comes to parking? I want to mention a couple of things that are important coming up. This is at the front end of the school year and this is true even if you're not new to campus. Some of you are coming back, you're a sophomore, you're going to be a junior, you're going to be a senior, you kind of know how parking works, but everybody needs this reminder. Of course the first day of class is Monday, August 26th. If you're parked illegally on Sunday right before that, it's not a bad thing, but if you leave it there, then all of a sudden you're parked illegally on Monday and that's the first day of class and we have literally thousands of people descending upon the campus. We have 27,000 students. Yes, and we have thousands of employees and I tell people all the time when this school goes, it cranks up in the fall and then every day thereafter, this is like a small city. So if you are parked, we're going to push this out on social media as well, but please, please make sure if your car is parked somewhere that maybe it shouldn't be on Sunday before classes start, get out there on Sunday and move it to where it needs to be. You don't want to think, well, I'll get up early and then I'll go move it at six in the morning because if you're going to class that first day, you have other things that you need to be thinking about. So we urge everybody that Sunday before first class to make sure you're in the right place because we literally have thousands of people coming. We've got people living here already, but then we have others coming in. So it's better for you if you park, make sure on that Sunday before class that everything's where it should be. David, we've got a question from Philip and he asked us, what is transportation like on campus? Is it free? What does students do if they do if they need to get home and transit is done for the night? So we'll take it one by one. Okay. What is transportation like on campus? I think specifically transit, yeah. Yes. Well, we're really, we're really proud of Razorback Transit. And like everything in transit and parking, it's expensive to run, but we don't have to charge students or anyone else, anything to ride a Razorback Transit bus. Mm-hmm. Like I said, they have a huge budget that they have to take care of. And here's a bit of trivia. Each new Razorback Transit bus is about $450,000 apiece. That's what I heard last. So it's not like we can just go out and buy a couple of new buses any time. But there's a lot of money, but some of that is provided by federal rent. And so we don't charge riders. And that's great because students are paying for enough things as it is just to go to college. So to answer the question, it's free. And we're proud to be able to tell people that. But it is limited. It starts about 6.40 in the morning and it runs till about 10.30 or 10.40 at night. You can catch a bus anywhere. You need to go and fight a bill on your own campus. So that's very convenient, it's very helpful. Now, if you're caught somewhere, let's say you're, if you are somewhere late at night. 11 o'clock, midnight. Yeah, you can't call Razorback Transit to come and get you. But on our website, if you go to the SafeRide link, that's what they're there for. Now, SafeRide, and I make this clear too, they are here on campus to help you get to where you live. Whether it's your residence hall or if you're staying somewhere else in town, they take you to only your address. We've had some students in the past think, well, maybe they could take us from this party to another party. Oh my gosh. That's not what SafeRide is here for. SafeRide is to get you home. And that's their only purpose. So if you're somewhere where you're without a ride, you can do that. And you'll look at the link on our website and it'll tell you the ins and outs of that operation and the hours that they're available to. So nobody needs to feel like they're all alone when they're going to college. Yeah. I'll make a quick plug too for bicycling in our community. You know, if it's late at night, we have a really safe community. And we have a great place called the Greenway that runs throughout our city too. So you could potentially bike from one end of Fayetteville to the other. You know, super late at night, one o'clock, two o'clock. It can be, you can feel, just because it's so dark, but it's really quite safe. So consider bicycles too. And we have, but, V-O-Ride? V-O-Ride. V-O-Ride. And is parking transit involved with that a little bit? We are involved with it. That's not something we created. Okay. It was started in partnership with the university and with the city of Fayetteville. We have our hand in it, though, in a big way. They kind of wanted that to be a little bit under our umbrella. So we help promote that. There's a link on our website that'll connect you with that and with all the information. That's not a free service that we provided. You know, V-O-Ride is a company that serves a lot of communities like ours. And so you'll want to read about that and read about what the cost would be to you as a student if you want to use those bikes. But it's really kind of a cool setup. Yeah. You bet. Well, anything else we want to talk about when it comes to parking? I don't know. He has covered a lot. Covered a lot of terrain, a lot of ground, a lot of mines. I can tell you that a couple of things that come to my mind that we always want to emphasize with our students. First, you probably heard some bad things about us. I mean, it happens. I hear some of the rumors that are out there. Some of those rumors are not really true. If somebody says that we write out parking citations, yes, that's true. But sometimes people say things like the people that write up the citations are doing it because they're paid on the commission. That's not true. Receive a commission. Things like that are offered. They have a quota of how many they have to write up. Nothing like that's true. The truth is, here's what I want you to know is we're really here to help you. One of our interns wrote an essay about working here. She wrote, transit and parking is really not the big bad wolf that everybody says they are. I would concur with that because we're just people like you are. We have a job that we need to do. We're all about safety and we're all about helping students and employees just get to where they need to be. That's our main function. I will add this as well. On campus, this is an educational institution. You're going to get a great education here and we're proud of that and we're proud to be a part of it. At transit and parking, we look at it like we're supporting the educational mission of this university. You need to get to class. You need to get your work done. You've got a lot of things to be concerned about to take care of all of your obligations. We just want to help facilitate that process. If we can get you where you need to be on campus with as little of a hassle as possible, that's what we try to do. That leads me to the next point. Sometimes you might have a question or you might even have a better idea or a different perspective. We encourage you to contact us about that because that's helpful. We'll take feedback from students. You can contact us in a number of ways. The email is on our website. You can certainly call. You can certainly email me if you want. My email is on our WordPress site, but I'm at dbw010 at ur.edu. You can email me and say, hey, I've got this question. So we are welcoming interaction with students because I think that's helpful for everybody involved. And it eliminates some misunderstandings sometimes. I'd also say we'd like you to follow us on social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. We provide information on all of that. And we have a WordPress site called Talk TMP. That's in addition to our regular website. Did you point it out for us, Sam? All right, let's see. Okay. You can connect with those anytime you want. The talk website is the one that has all of the regulations, the requirements, how you buy a permit. All of those nuts and bolts that are on there. If you go to Talk TMP, you're going to find some articles about some of it's about parking, some of it's about college life or just general interest. This is more of an online magazine that we provide. But both of those are something that we'd like you to connect with. We think it might be something very helpful. So contact us on any day, on any of those issues. We had a couple final comments come in. And I thought we might go ahead and address them and kind of end our very informative program here. One is from EA, sorority recruitment ones late at night. Can safe ride be used to get back to the halls? They can be used to get back to the halls if you live there. If you don't, if you live somewhere else on campus, of course they're in town, they're going to take you to where the address is. We will certainly bring you back to your home on campus. Yes. Of course. Madeleine says that she will be an incoming freshman this fall. Can't wait to have you come here. I'm saying that to her. And received a new car after I filled out my parking permit information. Where should I go on campus slash email to update my car info before I move in? That can be done on our website. Okay. You can go in and change it in my parking account. Yeah. If you run into any problem, though, I would call here and have someone walk you through it. Yeah. Excellent. By 7-5-PARK. Yeah. Update it that way online. And Paula's just chiming in with some good information. She purchased her son's green permit and was able to print out a temporary permit good for 10 days from today. Awesome. So good to be able to use those temporaries as need be. Yeah. Any final thoughts? Well, like I said, we're just here to try to serve this university. We want to help you get to where you need to be. Communicate with us anytime you want. I will say this. There are sometimes on social media, some folks aren't always fair with their criticism. We understand it. Here's the real deal. If somebody gets a parking citation, whether it's me or anybody else, if you get a parking citation, you never really feel good about it. I mean, even if you're a person that knows I deserve that, that's on me, you still don't feel good about it. It's just not pleasant. We understand that. So if you are telling us that you don't like it when you got a parking citation, we agree with you. We wouldn't like it either. But please just work with us and we'll work through any issue that you might have and try to resolve any question you have to. Yeah. Thank you guys so much for watching today and thank you to David for joining us. Thanks, David. I wish we could do it again. Tomorrow we're actually going to do a live tour just like this about the move-in process. So be sure to check that out. I'll have a lot of great information and tips for you guys. But thank you guys so much for watching today.