You roll into the SF State parking garage and after a search for a space that takes you four levels up or down into the bowels of the earth, you grab your wallet and head for the nearest ticket vending machine. You insert your dollar bill. A moment later the paper currency is spit back.You walk around the corner to another machine, but on approach you discover a sign, “Coins Only” and a shake of your pocket that produces no jingling tells you: you're fresh out.

If per-hour-parking fees were just a fact of life at your average university, then I would likely just go on with blind acceptance and nary a complaint, but I discovered that this isn't the case.

A little research turned up that of the four state universities in the Bay Area—Sonoma State University, CSU East Bay, San Jose State University and SF State—SF State is the only one that doesn't offer semester passes to all of its students. Only campus residents are considered deserving of such a pass, and even then, the pass only gives them full access to Lot 25, almost half a mile from campus.

Are we used to paying elevated per-hour parking fees in the city and would feel right at home with the system? Is it simply a matter of deepening the administration's pockets? These were my own theories but I decided to find out the official word on the subject, so I posed the question to the Parking and Transportation Office at SF State. “We can't offer all students a parking permit because we could not guarantee a parking space. There are not enough parking spaces,” Chief Kirk Gaston said.

Not only were his numbers not complete enough to prove that the lots do in fact fill up before all students have been served, but his own words in a subsequent correspondence contradicted his initial statement.

Approximately $9,000 is collected per day from parking permits bought by some 2,300 drivers, according to Gaston. If those same 2,300 bought semester permits at $225 a piece (the price students pay for the Lot 25 permit) then the university’s revenue would drop to around $517,500 per semester, down from the $738,000 the university currently earns, according to Gaston. These numbers make it clear that the unwillingness of the powers-that-be to offer semester permits across the board comes down, as almost everything does, to the almighty buck.

It’s time to offer semester parking permits to everyone. It doesn’t have to bring down the university’s revenue. Just raise the prices of the permits to compensate.