<p>How does it work? Are there requirements? I'm going to have to bring my car for the summer and fall semester.</p>
<p>I’m also curious. Is there a fee or something? Also would you recommend it?</p>
<p>Very very hard to get overnight parking permit - generally need some medical issue and then jump through hoops. The parking passes are for daytime visits, essentially designed for students commuting from home. </p>
<p>Parking in the area around the school is pretty much a hostile nightmare. Byzantine system of small zones with resident parking stickers, and dorm students are not considered residents by the city. A string of city traffic enforcement/revenue production carts buzz around the streets nailing cars that violate regulations, are at expired meters or stay over the two hour max per spot. There are a few areas where someone might park but you will be joining many who are circling incessantly waiting for the few spots to open. Even those with resident permits for a zone may have to drive a bit to find any place to put their otherwise legal car. Then there are the street cleaning times when the legal spots have to be vacated. How many hours do you want to spend each week driving vainly looking for spots, or paying fines to the city all the time?</p>
<p>Basically, you need a monthly parking spot. That usually involves leasing such a spot from a nearby building or from a tenant who ‘sells’ the space that comes with their apartment. The municipal lot near Telegraph has monthly spots but well over $100 per month; other spots are cheaper but still in the range of 50-90 a month. </p>
<p>The bottom line is that bringing a car is not a good idea. You get free bus transportation plus have access to BART and other longer range transportation at much less than the cost of ransoming a car.</p>
<p>It’s $325 a semester. You go to the Office of Parking and Transportation to get your student parking permit. You can park in any area designated as a “Student” parking lot. A map can be found here:</p>
<p>[Maps</a> | UC Berkeley - Parking & Transportation](<a href=“http://pt.berkeley.edu/maps]Maps”>Maps | Parking and Transportation)
Click on the student parking lots to see where students can park.</p>
<p>A few places I like to park at: Underhill parking structure, channing-dana parking structure, Strawberry Canony parking lot (I like to go swimming there), and there is a parking lot on North side on Hearst.</p>
<p>I hope that helps you all.</p>
<p>May I add that I live across the street from a UC Berkeley-owned parking structure, and I leave my car in the parking lot over night for days at a time with no problem. I haven’t even been towed when the parking lot was reserved for football games either, so you can park there until your permit expires for the semester.</p>
<p>Bringing my car to college was one of the best decisions I have made. Trust me.</p>
<p>green-aw-lives - nice to hear that. The ‘letter of the law’ was certainly different, which is why I gave out the advice I did. Knowing that Cal will not enforce that restriction is the key and your experience has been good - very different from the city of berkeley’s attitude toward parking regulations.</p>
<p>There is a very remote storage lot that Cal owns for students to ‘stash’ cars, not really suitable for day to day use but that is a $358 per year option if the car is only going to be needed sporadically. Wished I remembered it earlier.</p>
<p>so with the $358 fee, you’ll have no trouble parking around the campus at all (in the structures owned by berkeley)? I went to a state school while i was in high school and they charged $115 or so for the semester and like $300 for the year. I had to get it cuz i drove my self and I live 10 mins away…our transportation isn’t “rapid” either. Most people, where i live, don’t ride buses unless they’re homeless or low-income but obviously it’s different in SF and berkeley.</p>
<p>I’m a little bit lost on this.</p>
<p>I had heard that getting a UCB Residence Hall parking permit was a real pain.</p>
<p>Are you saying that as long as I am willing to pay around $1200 for the year I can get a parking permit?</p>
<p>the web site and regulations say that to park overnight you need a residence hall permit, which is typically granted for certain medical and disability reasons not for general student requests. However, green-aw-lives reports that he was able to use a semester pass for commuting students and leave his car overnight in the university lots without any ticketing or towing. Anyone else have experiences with using the daytime pass overnight in the lots, negative or positive?</p>
<p>I haven’t had any experience with the daytime pass overnight, but I’ve left my car in Underhill during the week on a Storage Lot Pass and never been nailed for it. I tended to play by the rules, so this was a pretty rare thing, but it still doesn’t seem as though Underhill are particularly draconian about things.</p>
<p>That said, Storage Lot Pass is actually pretty nice now that 9 has been replaced with the 49 (assuming you live in Unit 1, 2, or 3…especially 1 and 3).</p>