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Abstract
Abstract
As of Fall 2024, the University Police Department (UPD) at Texas State University absorbed the Parking Services Department and now enforces Texas State’s parking regulations. Only very involved faculty, staff, and students who pay attention to parking regulations regularly would have noticed that this merger occurred because the announcement was not made public. Texas State is known for keeping faculty, staff, and students up to date on new changes, so it was odd that changes to parking enforcement were not as celebrated as the other updates occurring in the Fall 2024 semester. I began to question why Texas State didn’t want to draw attention to parking.
A quick glance at the public Texas State University Parking Services' website began to answer some of my questions. Most of the website hasn’t been updated since the Spring 2022 semester, which makes the data mostly irrelevant to any individual looking at it. It appears that Texas State is struggling to quantify and reflect on their parking data, especially when compared to the university parking websites of other Texas Emerging Research Universities. For my project, I verified the 2022 parking data by hand counting parking spots and double-checking university maps. To support the verification of the 2022 parking data, I created audiovisual media that interprets Texas State’s parking data and regulations. My audiovisual media is intended to be in a more digestible format than the current parking website for students, faculty, staff, and visitors. With my research I have created a more useful parking resource for faculty, staff, and students that includes all the information I would expect from a Texas Emerging Research University.
What I want to see from parking
What I want to see from parking
One of the main reasons that I was able to complete this project as my capstone is because Texas State hasn't been updating their faculty, staff, and students about parking. I personally only knew Texas State merged with UPD because Chief Carmichael presented at the Spring 2025 Resident Assistant training. I also only knew about the new parking lots and garages because I read the emails sent out during the Fall 2024 semester about the master plan presentations. However, these emails did not specify that parking was included, I had to look at them to discover that there were parking updates.
Parking is something that almost every faculty, staff, and student interacts with every day and through my research I have learned that parking has been working on some great things. From the new lots and garages to the study being done in the 2025-2026 school year, these are all things that the Texas State population wants to hear about!
I have worked on research projects about Texas State University's transportation and how we compared to other Texas universities in previous years, so I already had knowledge of how the University of Houston (UH) does their parking. In my opinion, they are the goal that every University should be working towards parking-wise. For this project I thought it would be interesting to also look at other comparable schools' population-wise to Texas State University, and what I found startled me. When compared to other universities, we are very behind on quantifying and reflecting on our parking data, which tells me we are too focused on boosting our student numbers and have let go of the foundations of transparency and ensuring our students, faculty, and staff know what is happening.
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