At the beginning of the two years  Junbo Zhao has been driving to school, he would receive two citations per week.
“It’s hard to park in UO,” Zhao said. “They don’t have any space for students, and the time limit is very short.”
Zhao said he wanted to pay for the citations on time, but the amount added up so quickly and he couldn’t keep up with all the tickets.
A typical parking ticket ranges between $10 and $200, and within 30 days of the issued date the original amount doubles. It’s a one-time fine, said Gwen Bolden, director of parking and transportation department.
According to Bolden, “The parking citation is to maintain space for legal usage on campus.”
The University of Oregon’s parking and transportation department issues more than 15,000 tickets for illegal parking every year, but not all of them are collected.
In the recent 2013-14 fiscal year, the department received 75 percent of parking violation payments online and in person, leaving 6,000 tickets unpaid.
The department has adopted a parking amnesty program for the month of February, allowing drivers to pay citations at the initial price. Bolden reports that the department sent out a notification to students and faculty qualified for the program.
“It’s a chance to let people pay at the original price so we hope they’ll be more willing to pay their citation,” Bolden said. “And it’s a chance for us to clean out our book.”
To qualify for the amnesty program, the citation must have been issued before Jan. 1, 2014, and the vehicle cannot be registered in the university parking system.
Without this new program, the parking and transportation department could potentially receive an additional $300,000.
After applying this program, that amount could drop to $175,000 in total.
“We’d rather collect a small amount than not collect anything at all,” Bolden said.
All unpaid citations after February will be sent to a third-party company that has been approved by the university. The department gets 10 percent of the total amount.
Senior Chungti Lee said parking and getting tickets are “everyone’s problem.”
“Whether I pay for a parking permit or pay with meters, it’s always felt like I’m paying too much,” Lee said. “And I got parking tickets a lot too.”
Senior Yiju Chou pays via meter when drives to school, because she can never find a space with her parking permit.
“They have ridiculous time limits in the meter parking,” Chou said. “My shortest class is 50 minutes but the parking space is limited to only 46 minutes.”
Both Chou and Lee said they pay citations on time, but their friends rarely follow the rules.
“They lose the tickets, or they don’t know how to pay for the tickets,” Chou said.
Bolden said to avoid parking tickets, students can use alternative transportation to travel to school, or register their vehicles with the department and get parking permits.