Finding Parking Spaces at Mississippi State

STARKVILLE, Miss. (WCBI) – Enrollment at Mississippi State University continues to grow.

That’s great, but that means its campus has to grow right along with it.
Locating a parking space, when school is in session, can be a course in frustration.

Well, it turns out, there’s an app for that.

We pull into MSU’s Department of Parking and Transit for tonight’s edition of The Changing Family.

It’s Thursday morning.

You have 5 minutes to make it class.

Everywhere you look, every space is full.

Mike Harris is Director of Parking and Transportation at Mississippi State University.

He explains, ” On those peak times during the week, you are going to get somewhere in the neighborhood of 20-24 thousand vehicles on a day.”

I asked, ” And how many parking spaces are there?”

Mike answered, ” 13,654″.

Thankfully, not all those cars are on campus at the same time.

Still, open spaces are little like needles in haystacks.

Now, there is a free app to help you find them.

Thanks to these leaflets, incoming students can go right to it.

Mike explains, ” It will automatically give you your location on that app, and then you can see campus on your smart phone. It will show you various parking lots, and inside those parking lots, you’ll have different colored icons, you’ll have a green P, a blue P or a red P.”

Green P you’re good to go.

Blue, maybe.

Red, no parking.

The University staff does the heavy lifting.

Mike says, ” Our parking personnel goes through these zones, they actually relay back to us available parking in all the lots.”

Within seconds that information is on the app.

Mike adds, ” When you give a punch into that arrow, it will give you directions to that particular lot.”

You can even set your location to find your way back to your car, and for metered spaces you can set a helpful alarm.

Mike concludes, ” It takes that frustration out. You come into campus. You are in a hurry to find a parking place, pop up this app on your I-phone or Android and there you can find out if there is a space there or not and go right to an open area where you can find that location to park.”

All you need to do, is not oversleep.

Don’t count on the parking app for game days.

Mike says those are a whole different ball game.

He recommends taking the shuttle.