The Commute

Imagine leaving class a couple minutes late because you had to ask your professor a question. As you walk to your car, you notice a white and orange piece of paper on your windshield.

When you finally arrive at your car, you noticed that you received a ticket for parking in a spot longer than the allotted time. “But it was only five minutes!!” This is the song that many UWM students sing when it comes to getting tickets on campus. Parking checkers circle around UWM and the surrounding neighborhoods like clockwork.

UWM student Amber Bak recalls getting over $200 in tickets one summer because she wasn’t aware of the parking regulations of Milwaukee’s East Side. “I’m not from here, so I didn’t know that you needed a day pass and a night pass,” she says.

UWM students and other people that live near campus need parking passes to park on the street near their homes. Although many students live near campus, a lot of students don’t, and they have to commute to and from school from their home towns. Deena Ahmad lives in Oak Creek and says she leaves her house at least an hour before her classes start. “It’s pretty smooth in the morning, and at night it differs like what time I have to go. Like at 5 o’clock, of course I hit traffic, so I always try to avoid that and go later.”

Ahmad says that she parks in the student union parking structure sometimes, which is a pay-by-hour parking structure. Or the Northwest quad structure, which is currently free for students but by Fall 2015, students will have to pay to park there. Ahmad also says that she parks in the Capitol and Humboldt parking lot, which is also free for students. Since the parking lot is about a 30-minute walk from campus, UWM has provided a bus to take students to and from their cars to campus with busses running at least every 15 minutes.

For students who don’t want to worry about the hassle of parking, or they just don’t have a car, UWM offers free bus passes to all UWM students. In addition to that, they have free shuttle services that takes students to their dorms and a shuttle service that runs only at night between 6 p.m. and 2 a.m called B.O.S.S. This shuttle is a bit more flexible than the shuttle that goes only to the dorms. B.O.S.S. covers approximately six square miles of Riverwest, Shorewood and the Upper East Side of Milwaukee centered around UWM.

So if you’re a student who is worrying about parking tickets, or gas prices, UWM offers many services to help students to get to school. However, if you’re not afraid of those pesky parking checkers, feel free to commute and park on campus.