The city of Memphis changed the strip of Zach Curlin Street on the south side of the University of Memphis campus to a no parking zone.
This part of the road is a popular parking spot for employees and students of the UofM and provides a much-needed parking relief as the garage and pedestrian bridge construction take up much of the parking available for campus.
Several students and staff have already received parking tickets just one and a half months after the change was made.
UofM’s chief of police Derek Myers answered some of students concerns about the southern strip of Zach Curlin Street.
Q: The strip along Zach Curlin on the south side of campus is where a lot of students park, until recently it became a no-parking zone. Why was that changed?
A: (Paraphrase) The change was initiated by the city to complete the construction. Once the construction is completed, parking along Walker Avenue near train tracks will be permitted.
Q: What are you doing about the large number of students parking there every day with construction going on?
A: (Many people who park on the streets are employees). Because again, they get here before the students do. And the students, most of their classes aren’t going to start until 8 a.m. So, most people aren’t going to have to be here until around 7:45 a.m. I know quite a few of the employees have a 7:30 start time, so they have to be there around 7:15 a.m. And there are actually some people that start before that, like (some of the custodians) have a 3 a.m. start time. I don’t know if that’s really students, but again, I just know that’s my impression from over the years that it’s mostly not students that have parked along that road.
Q: Are there new actions to implement this new change?
A: We don’t really do anything when it comes to the city streets, and we have to go to the city themselves and tell them why we want a change made, for instance, because it’s dangerous or something like that. Most people don’t know that around ’99 to about 2000, you used to be able to park on both sides of the street (on Zach Curlin) and the same for Patterson Street. And so, that again was changed years ago because of safety. Because if you have people parked all up and down the streets, you can’t see in order to make left turns especially. So, we kept on having accidents where people were getting hit trying to make, more or less, a blind left turn. They ended up taking all of the parking off of Zach Curlin and all the parking off of Patterson and putting those center turn lanes in for safety.
There have been a lot of changes over the years, and as the university progresses and the traffic patterns change, and the volume of people around here change, there might be a need to remove more street parking or change the traffic patterns. That’s the function of Campus Planning and working with the city engineer. They do what they call traffic studies, and they’ll decide how and where to, for example, put street lights or a traffic light. What they’re looking at is the volume and the traffic speed and the congestion and saying, ‘Would it really benefit us to put a light in here either from a safety standpoint or a traffic control standpoint?’ And so, (it’s the) same thing when they decide to take parking off of a road, put medians in, put a turn lane in and those kinds of things. They’re doing a traffic study to see the actual behavior that’s going on and how can we improve it.
