Driving up prices

Ticket, rate hikes take advantage of students

Attending a university can be a huge drain on the finances of both students and their families. Students attending the University - the most expensive public school in Michigan - are placed under an especially large financial strain. The city of Ann Arbor, however, seems to believe that University students are in possession of excess stores of money that they should be contributing to the city's coffers. This myth has led the Ann Arbor City Council to raise parking fees to 80 cents per hour - a hike of 20 cents - and to increase parking ticket fines from $5 to $10. These increases burden the budgets of University students and raise unnecessary funds for the city.

University students will be the drivers hit hardest by the change. Ann Arbor residents have driveways in which to park and University faculty members have lots. Since the University does not provide nearly enough parking for its student body, students are left out in the cold to deal with exorbitantly expensive parking meters. Students cannot afford to pay an extra 20 cents per hour to park on the street, and even less can they afford to pay an extra $5 for a parking ticket. Many students are forced to consider parking tickets an inevitable result of the University's abysmal parking situation, and the doubling of the fines will hit the student body's slim pocketbooks hard.

The parking meter increases were cited by councilmembers as an effort to alleviate the parking congestion in downtown Ann Arbor by forcing drivers into the parking structures. Not only is this effort untimely, with the planned closing, demolition and rebuilding of several downtown parking structures, but it inevitably will have a negative effect on downtown businesses. High parking meter rates dissuade students and Ann Arbor residents from driving downtown to shop or eat, but the doubled parking ticket fines may prove devastating. A $5 fine is nothing to laugh about, but receiving a $10 fine will lead drivers to head to less-congested areas of town to browse or dine, which will cause downtown businesses to suffer from diminished clientele.

These increases are supposed add $1 million to Ann Arbor's general fund - a fund that Councilmember Stephen Hartwell (D-4th Ward) cited to be sufficiently prosperous. The city's finances are already benefiting from involuntary donations from the pockets of University students through meter fees and parking tickets issued by meter monitors. The city police are already excessively diligent in their observation of parking meters - the unnecessary sight of a fanatical police officer racing a driver to reach an expired meter is not an unfamiliar one.

Ann Arbor should stop treating the University's student body like second-class citizens and end its unfair targeting of students with such legislation as the increase in parking fees. University students already pay a significant amount of money to the city of Ann Arbor, especially through parking tickets and street parking meters, and Ann Arbor should adjust its posture toward the University and stop treating its students as the source of an endless supply of money. With the lack of sufficient parking on the University campus, Ann Arbor should be more lenient with its ticketing instead of raising the parking rates and ticket fees in an effort to squeeze additional money out of the meager budgets of the University's student body.

04-13-98