Over 9% of the parking tickets issued were later appealed, Vizueta said. Of those 9,315 appeals, 4,292 led to withdrawn or reduced ticket violations .

Revenue made from parking tickets goes toward maintaining and building parking structures on campus, Vizueta said. It also funds half of MSU’s contract with the Capital Area Transportation Authority, which provides several free bus lines through campus. 

Parking is a continual source of frustration for many students. 

Adam de la Fuente, an environmental economics and management senior, said he’s been issued a $20 ticket around once per week. 

He works as a managerial assistant in the MSU Union, where he says there aren’t any free and available parking options for student workers. It didn’t help when parking violation fines were increased in June 2023.

In response, many of de la Fuente’s coworkers have given up driving to work altogether.

“They don’t want to have an hour plus of their paycheck being taken off just to park,” de la Fuente said.

That line of thinking could explain why MSU issued over 1,000 less tickets in 2024 than it did the year prior. In 2023, parking enforcers issued 97,585 tickets.

Vizueta said the decrease in tickets issued could be credited to a number of factors, like drivers being more conscientious in how they park — both to be more mindful of the rules and to avoid increased fees — and variations in how many enforcement staff are working each semester.

Students have also begun to try to outsmart parking enforcers.

TicketTime, an MSU student-made app that fields sightings of parking enforcement officers and notifies users when enforcers are near where they’ve parked, had over 500 downloads as of March 2024. TicketTime creator Keshav Babu was not available for an interview by the time of publication.

Students have also resorted to using large GroupMe chats dedicated to reporting parking enforcement sightings. One such group has nearly 2,000 members and is active almost hourly.