Data science sophomore Max Gillum has received over twenty parking tickets. Although he pays for parking in the Division St. lot across the street from campus, he says he has received numerous violations due to not having ample parking on campus for students. 

"It's really convenient (for students) to have a car on campus. I understand sort of their perspective on why (MSU tickets cars), because they want to limit car use on campus (due to limited parking spots), that's why they ticket so much, but it is misfortunate," he said. 

Gillum lived in Hubbard Hall last year where he would occasionally park in the closer, metered spots for convenience rather than parking in the farther lot that he pays monthly for. He said that there were times he would leave his dorm to find multiple tickets on his car.

MSU Department of Police and Public Safety spokesperson Dana Whyte said that when looking at the high number of violations, it must be taken into account the size of MSU's student body and faculty, which consists of more than 50,000 students and more than 12,000 faculty. 

"When you think about that, thinking how this campus is basically a small city within itself, that explains why the number is a bit higher," Whyte said. 

Whyte said the most common violations are in metered spots, where people either choose not to pay or their payments expire.

She said the best way to prevent this kind of violation is to download the Spot On app so that you can pay for meters on your phone rather than at the meter itself. 

To cut down on violations in 2024, Whyte said the department is focusing on awareness and education. She said they want to enact plans to educate students and faculty about what specific violations are and how to avoid them as well as resources they can reach out to if they have questions. 

"We really want to make sure that we're being more proactive," she said. 

When it comes to where all the money from these citations goes, Whyte said that it is used towards safety updates and repairs on campus, including lot repairs and signage replacement repairs. The money also goes towards public safety efforts such as installing more GreenLight emergency phones on campus. 

Computer science senior Keshav Babu had a friend, who similar to Gillum, was facing the heat of continuous parking violations. 

He decided to take matters into his own hands and create an app that would help ease his friends', and many others', problems. 

"I was seeing a lot of people getting parking tickets and I was like, 'Okay, this is actually a real issue,'" he said. 

Towards the end of the spring 2023 semester, Babu released TicketTime, where students can report the presence of parking enforcement to warn off others. 

"If anybody is walking by a parking lot these days, they can go into the app, report parking enforcement on that specific lot and if you are currently parking in that lot, you'll get a notification and can go onto Spot On and add more time to your meter," he said. "It's kind of like a little bit of a game where you can try to optimize the amount of money you use (on parking)."

Babu believes that if enough people use his app, it will create a dent in the number of parking tickets given out. 

"The idea behind the app is that it's crowd-sourced, so the more people that use it, the better the app works," he said. "The more people that are on it, that means more eyes out on campus, that means more people are seeing PACE, and more people are gathering information to help other students."