Community Chest: Proceed to free parking and pay the University nothing.

Some students have been pulling this Monopoly card, allowing them to park in University ramps for free while monitors aren’t on duty, stealing about $3 each hour from the University.

Kiersten Wessling, a public relations junior, has admittedly taken advantage of this and other loopholes since she discovered them by accident her first year on campus.

“It was kind of luck I guess,” she said. “I parked my car over there one night and I didn’t have to pay the next morning.”

Since that first day, Wessling said she took advantage of free parking on 15 to 20 occasions and told three of her friends how to do it.

She said she drives into various ramps after the last monitor’s shift, and takes her car out before the first monitor arrives the next morning.

But Bob Baker , the head of University Parking and Transportation, said the numbers of drivers taking advantage of the system are surprisingly low — too low, he said, to do anything about it.

“You’ve got a few miscreants that are going to show up and take advantage of the system,” he said.

Baker said the number of abusers wouldn’t make overnight staffing economical. If there were overnight monitors in every ramp, he said, drivers wouldn’t park in the ramps because they’d still want to park for free, and the University would lose money due to the extra staffing.

To combat drivers looking for unmonitored and empty ramps, the University hires a late-night crew that switches between all ramps on campus on different nights.

“We’ll put staff people in there, and of course everybody disappears, so then we pull the staff people out,” Baker said. “It’s a little bit of a cat-and-mouse routine.”

But even without a human monitor around, Baker knows how many people are in the ramps because of floor sensors, car counters and camera systems in each ramp.

Also, for safety reasons, drivers must be able to exit ramps after hours.

Besides students, other drivers have taken advantage of the lots as well. Last week a car that exhibited signs of being stolen — the car and automatic windows worked without a key — was impounded from a University parking ramp.

University police Deputy Chief Chuck Miner said occasionally drivers will leave their cars in the ramps for days or weeks.

“People try to basically store their vehicle in parking facilities,” Miner said.

The offenders will move their cars around between monitors’ shifts, he said. That way, a scan of the camera footage won’t incriminate a car that has been in the same ramp for days.

It’s rare that a stolen car is parked in the University ramps, but people using the ramps as garages aren’t rare, Baker said.

Parking crews monitor the ramps, checking for cars with excessive dust, fluid leakage and flat tires to make sure no one is using a ramp for personal storage. If people are taking advantage of the system, their cars can be towed.

Baker said the long-term parkers are usually out-of-town professors or people with cars that have broken down.

Parking in the University’s ramps costs about $3 each hour for the first hour, and about $12 for the day, a cost that Baker said has gone up with inflation, and will continue to rise just like “tuition” and “the price of milk.”

But some students, like Wessling, argue that parking fees aren’t reasonable.

She said she specifically looks for free parking on the street near her Dinkytown house or metered parking in Stadium Village after 10 p.m.

“I feel that the ramps are ridiculously overpriced,” she said.

But parking on campus isn’t supposed to be cheap, Baker said, because that only encourages students to drive their cars.

The implications for American drivers — infrastructural, environmental and economical costs — are motivation enough for students to look for alternative forms of transport, Baker said.

Baker said students have plenty of transportation options, “so I don’t think part of the menu should be free parking.”