<p>I’m an incoming freshman at Cal Poly this fall and I’m thinking about bringing my car.
I want to know what percentage of students (freshman) being their cars and how bad or good parking is. Cal Poly website says that parking is LIMITED.
I need advice on this please ASAP. I would appreciate it.
Thank you!</p>
<p>Few first year students bring cars, I don’t know the details but I would guess less than 10%, possibly less than 5%. You will probably be plenty busy, with little need for your first year.</p>
<p>While it’s not necessary, it is nice to have a car. Parking is pretty convenient if you live on campus, but it will cost you. It’s around $170/quarter (slightly cheaper if you buy an annual pass within the first couple weeks of school). It comes down to 2-3 dollars/day, which isn’t bad, but still, not everyone wants to spend that kind of money.</p>
<p>My kid had a car from freshman year. It was handy for getting back and forth from LA when needed. He was also able to go shopping at Costco and other places a bit farther away. It was hardly necessary, but did provide extra freedom. He was also able to go on photo shoots farther away from campus, etc. Parking is no problem and there is plenty of surface lot parking around campus. Now that he is in Poly Canyon Village, he has excellent covered parking in the structure. It is about $170 a quarter. If you have a car you will be popular and people will ask for rides. Also, people will ask for rides back home or along the way. My kid rarely had to pay all the gas to come home as plenty of folks post a need for transportation home on weekends and end of quarters, etc.</p>
<p>Most of the time, to get to downtown and areas near San Luis Obispo, I took the bus. The San Luis Obispo bus is free and takes you around most of SLO. On weekdays, they come every 30 minutes. Although they come frequently, I realized that it would be more convenient to bring a car. The buses come every hour on weekends and they are sometimes not reliable. I can also do groceries much easier with a car. It is hard to carry a lot of food on the bus. It is also hard to buy ice cream and certain other frozen foods if you travel by bus.</p>
<p>The agreement here is that our daughter wouldn’t take her car as a freshman. She did a lot of walking, some biking, rode the bus occasionally and the rest of the time got rides with fellow students who had cars. She’s had her car since her sophomore year where she paid almost $500 for it to sit in the PCV garage almost all day. Junior year she lived off campus and took the bus to school. She’ll do the same this year, as well as walking to campus.</p>
<p>We asked the student tour guide about having a car as a freshman at each of the schools my son visited. Most students recommended that freshmen DON’T have cars. Few do and you will be constantly hounded to drive someone somewhere or let them borrow our car was the reason they gave. One of my son’s friends did have a car freshman year and it wasn’t as bad as we were led to believe but he still had the requests.</p>
<p>My son took the Amtrak train back and forth from the LA area to SLO. Gave him some time to read and was more relaxing than driving. Many other students did the same.</p>
<p>He did take his car up his sophomore year and it spent most of the time in the parking lot. He used it mostly to come back and forth to home.</p>
<p>FYI. We were able to drop our son from the auto insurance his freshman year since he lived at school. He was still able to drive it when he came home as he was now considered a guest. So the cost of having a car at school is more than just gas, oil and parking but the lost savings in auto insurance.</p>