In the aftermath of Hurricane Isaac, Parking Services is making sure that the university has enough parking spaces in order to accommodate the vehicles of all of the students, faculty and staff.

Captain Roger Pinac of University Police states that approximately 1,654 permits have been issued so far. He also says that compared to other universities, Loyola has a good amount of parking spaces on Loyola’s main campus and on the Broadway campus.

“We have approximately 1,600 spaces,” said Pinac in an email. “Universities on average have a permit to space ratio of 2.7-to- 1. As you can see, our permit to space ratio is very good.”

Assistant vice president for Student Affairs Robert Reed, who is also the head of the Parking Services Committee, says that there have not been any complaints concerning parking on campus as of right now, although the university is still in the early weeks of the semester.

Reed says that there should not be many issues with parking due to the addition of the new two floors of the West Road Garage.

“Once we added the two floors to the West Road Garage, that sort of has eliminated that (limited parking) as a major issue,” said Reed. “That doesn’t mean on occasions you might not have a parking issue, but right now there’s no parking issue on campus that we are aware of in terms of availability.”

Patrick Thompson, music performance freshman, commutes to Loyola every morning and says that he has not had a problem with getting a parking space so far, as long as he comes to campus before 9:30 a.m.

“After 9:30 a.m or so, the parking garages are pretty much full, and it’s really hard to find available parking,” said Thompson.

Despite some small issues with only a few students having to do street parking, Pinac states that he does not believe that there will be any significant problems with parking in Loyola for this year.

If the university does run out of parking availability, Reed says that there are two solutions that can fix the problem.”There are a lot of ways to address it, but the normal way is to add parking or, if you have limited parking, you may have to restrict certain groups from having access to permits,” said Reed. “Those are the only options that you really have.”

Burke Bishop can be reached at [email protected]