Rodrigo Rojas, a fourth‑year mechanical engineering student, starts every weekday before dawn by plotting what he calls “the loop” — a three‑street circuit that snakes past Assembly, Main and Bull streets in hopes of nabbing one of Columbia’s curbside spots. If no spaces appear, his 1999 Mazda Miata, bought for its low cost and 30‑mpg efficiency, ends up tucked illegally behind an apartment complex, where he prays the meter maid will miss him until his classes end.
Several months earlier, in August, USC quietly raised permit prices, increased fines and expanded enforcement. These changes have and will continue to hit lower-income and marginalized students the hardest — those for whom a parking ticket isn’t just an inconvenience but a financial setback.
In a statement, University Spokesperson Collyn Taylor said, “USC’s administration, including the Board of Trustees, approved modest increases to both parking permits and parking fines on campus in August … Both price increases reflect three things: inflationary costs for a self-sustaining unit on campus, an effort to better align fines with the market as well as an effort to create an equitable system for students, faculty and staff who purchased permits.”
Parking prices hiked in Columbia, USC first and the city second. A number of the university’s over 38,000 students do not live in the Main Street District's gentrifying apartments or on-campus dorms; they drive in from farther‑flung rentals with lower rent.
For them, transportation isn’t a lifestyle choice; it’s the cost of attendance. When fees are raised during a single academic year, the math is brutal: a $440 commuter permit or $1.50 an hour if students fail to find a spot in the assigned garage; $25 if students misjudge the clock; perhaps $880 for a full‑year deck pass if students want peace of mind.
“If we could afford an $800-a-year parking pass, then we wouldn’t be worrying about this," Rojas said, calling the price hikes “just another money grab."
USC said that parking is a self-sustaining unit, but self‑sustaining auxiliaries are not self‑isolating ecosystems. Every dollar siphoned from a Pell‑eligible student’s wallet is a dollar unavailable for food, rent or lab fees. USC’s own Office of Financial Aid pegs the average cost for in‑state undergraduates at nearly $30,000. When parking becomes a luxury subscription, the message is clear: mobility on campus is a privilege reserved for the lucky wealthy.
Meanwhile, USC points to its shuttle system as a solution. But as Rojas notes, reliably using off‑site lots for everyday travel remains hypothetical.
“Parking shouldn’t be a privilege,” he said, adding that navigating multiple fares “feels like a burden for the student from the university." He now rearranges classes or skips optional lectures to avoid tickets, an academic penalty invisible in the revenue spreadsheets.
Equity is not a sentimental bonus; it is a core transportation metric. The University of Washington, located in Seattle, and UC Berkeley, located in the San Francisco Bay Area, hardly paragons of cheap living, offers free student transit passes for local transit systems. Even Columbia’s COMET partners with Midlands Technical College to bundle unlimited rides into tuition. USC could emulate those models by expanding its relatively undersized bus network or working with COMET to expand into surrounding neighborhoods, subsidizing universal passes with a sliver of its $2.1 billion budget and reserving high‑cost decks for those who opt in.
Growth is good, but growth that prices out the very students feeding the local talent pipeline is self‑defeating. Innovation districts thrive on diverse access: the student intern who closes a restaurant shift at 1 a.m., the single parent pursuing a nursing credential and the first‑generation engineer perfecting a senior design project. Make it harder for them to park on campus for courses — or harder still to afford the alternative — and you siphon away possibility.
It’s been nearly eight weeks since the March 1 rollout, but the promised modern meters are still trickling in. Enforcement officers circle like hawks, and when asked to describe the system in a single emotion, Rojas paused before answering, “Stressed”. That’s not the kind of brand a flagship university or a capital city should be stamping onto opportunity.
We can still recalibrate. Freeze rates for the next budget cycle. Channel a share of parking revenue into need‑based transit stipends. Publish a public dashboard showing exactly how every fine funds a safer, greener campus. If officials truly believe parking is about equitable turnover and modernization, then prove it by ensuring the costs do not fall hardest on students already juggling tuition, rent and groceries.
Rojas still drives the loop each morning, windows down, hoping luck beats privilege for another day. The odometer on his decades‑old Miata keeps clicking upward. So does the tally of students asking why the path to class starts with a tollbooth they can barely afford. The university can keep chasing revenue, or it can choose a model that treats parking as infrastructure for learning rather than an entry fee to it. For the city that markets itself as “Famously Hot,” nothing would be cooler than backing that choice with policy.