7a- Testing the Hypothesis, Part 1

1. The opportunity I would like to pursue is the limited amount of free parking throughout University of Florida and Gainesville.

2. Parking throughout University of Florida’s campus is extremely difficult, there is not enough spots for students to park their cars and scooters and students are starting to walk. In addition, throughout Gainesville, there are few parking garages that you can keep your car in for the year for a reasonable price.

3. There are many students affected by the limited parking because the majority of University of Florida students are from Florida and tend to drive down to school and  have nowhere to keep their cars for a reasonable price. This does not pertain to everyone because some students get dropped off by guardians. In addition, there is issues within the Transportation and parking services within UF because people are get ticketed and there is an option to appeal your ticket which takes a couple of weeks maybe even a month to complete and TAPS does not take in account that you are appealing your tickets and if you get more than 3 tickets without paying them your scooter will be booted and suspended from parking on campus for the rest of the year. This affects many students because a lot of students are on a full ride or are strictly on financial aid and cannot afford to pay these tickets so they appeal them. This has been happening to a lot of students and they have even more limited parking on campus.

4. Interview 1

This student is a Junior at the University of Florida she lives in an off-campus house.  She has her car at school and pays to keep it in a downtown parking garage for the year and only uses it to go to places off campus. After 3 years of trying to find parking she gave up and does not use her car to get to campus because there are no spots, now she usually walks or scoots. She did complain about her scooter getting ticketed often due to the fact that other students move her scooter to fit their scooter in which puts her scooter in an illegal spot. She is unhappy about the limited parking and that she needs to pay to keep her car in a parking garage.

Interview 2

This student is a sophomore at the University of Florida and lives on fraternity row. He has his car at school and parks it on fraternity row. This is convenient for him because it is free and he lives there. However, he does not drive his car to campus due to the limited parking. This student usually uber's to class because the walk is too far from fraternity row.  Even though he doesn't have to pay for parking he regrets bringing his car to school because he has no need for it, he usually does not travel outside of the Gainesville area and when he does he uses uber. He agrees that parking is extremely limited around campus which is why he does not attempt to drive to class.

Interview 3

This student is a Sophomore at the University of Florida and lives at standard. She has her car at school but she is trying to get her parents to drive it home because she has no use for it.  She pays for parking at the standard and she says its very expensive and she doesn't want to pay for it anymore because she rarely uses her car.  She does not use her car to get to campus because she is in the business school and Standard is very close to that. She says that there is really no need to have a car to get around campus because there is no parking. Unless you want to go through the hassle of looking for parking for 20-30 minutes then you should not even attempt to park on campus.

Interview 4

This student is a junior at the University of Florida and lives at Estates. He has his car at school and parks it at fraternity row because he doesn't want to pay for parking at Estates and thinks that there is no other place to park his car. He usually uses his scooter to drive to campus but cannot park on campus because he was suspended due to 3 unpaid tickets. Every time he parks on campus he usually gets more tickets and recently he got booted. He thinks this system is extremely unfair because he cannot afford to pay his tickets and is trying to appeal them but has not heard back from TAPS in months. He does not like the fact that TAPS has a faulty system and takes so long to respond. In addition, he said that he doesn't really use his car unless he is going somewhere off campus and it is a hassle to uber to fraternity row every time he needs his car.

Interview 5

This is a Senior at the University of Florida who lives behind midtown in an apartment complex. This student used to bring her car to school and then realized it's not worth it to pay for year-round parking to only use your car to get off campus. She feels that if you uber rented a Zipcar it would be a lot cheaper than having your own vehicle here.  She walks or bikes o her classes, her freshman year she drove to some of her further classes but soon realized it was a mistake to do so. Since she is a senior she learned the ways of Florida's parking and believes that it is unnecessary to have a car on campus because it is too difficult to find parking and too expensive to keep her car here for the year.

5. After interviewing these 5 people I found that every student feels almost the same way about the difficulty of parking around campus and keeping their car here year round. I realized that it is really expensive and an inconvenience for many to bring their car to school.  I didn't speak to anyone who said that they have no problems with parking. In addition, I recently became aware about the whole corrupted TAPS system because they are giving these students such a hard time and blatantly just trying to make money off of them without putting in an account for their financial statuses.  This opportunity belief seems to be shared by many people and I feel that there needs to be a solution to this problem.