The worst part is paying for the permit and still having to spend 20 minutes circling the lot like a vulture because there are zero spots left. You’re basically paying for a license to hunt for parking.

I’m a third-party non-employee lecturer at my local university. I teach scuba, underwater photography, and scientific diving. The courses are taught off-campus at a dive shop using the shop’s its classrooms, pool, and equipment. The liability insurance is paid by me.

There’s a lake on campus we dive at, and the university charges students to enter it.

The students have to pay $3000+ in tuition for some of my classes.

…and the university doesn’t give me or the shop a dime. The students have to pay a 200 dollar lab fee, and that’s split between me and the shop for the semester. The only thing the university provides is the course numbers and taking the money, and they get 30 times as much money as I do.

I have multiple individual cameras I use to teach the class that cost more than I make in 5 years of teaching the photography class.

And they want to charge me $800/year for parking for the rare occasions when I need to go on campus.

Fuck that - I just let them ticket me. The parking services department isn’t a law enforcement agency. The biggest threat they really have is withholding grades for students who owe parking tickets.

Dutch universities: “bike parking is free. There’s a bus stop in front of every building and busses are free for students. Why would we waste everyone’s money just so you can park for free?”

At UMD, you have to buy a parking pass, but during basketball and football games you can’t use them and you can’t park there, because they’re selling our spaces for more money to sports attendees. Insane.

My uni charged a parking fee to every student.

You still couldn’t park unless you also bought a parking pass.