Justin Edwards was certain he would get a parking permit in the Hitt Street Parking Structure for his senior year at the University of Missouri. He didn’t get his wish.

Parking permits for Hitt Street and all other garages in the core of campus sold out before seniors were allowed to start buying permits at 9 a.m. Monday. MU reduced the number of available core campus permits from 3,025 to 2,625, and graduate and professional students bought them all last week. Core campus is the area within Providence Road, Elm Street, College Avenue and Stadium Boulevard. Parking lots outside this perimeter were the next available options for undergraduates to buy parking permits.

Edwards ended up with a permit for the SG7 lot next to the football stadium, almost a half-hour walk from his apartment complex downtown. He is one of many students who are frustrated about having to park so far from where they live and where they attend classes. Several students have expressed their discontent on Twitter since Monday.

The university has 23,298 parking spaces in 80 parking lots and seven garages. MU spokeswoman Liz McCune said the total number of campus parking spaces has not changed. The MU parking and transportation department used to sell more permits than there were spaces in core campus structures, and students sometimes could not find a parking space in structures they had paid to use, McCune said.

Edwards said he had a parking permit for the AV14 lot east of College Avenue the past three years. It was easier for him to park on campus and risk getting tickets last year, he said, and he knows other students have done the same.

McCune said students who could get away with parking on campus without a permit are now incentivized to buy permits or find other ways to get to campus. All parking meters on campus now cost $1 per hour. Some campus meters used to cost 60 cents per hour.

Parking is no longer free to everyone in all garages and lots after 5 p.m. and on weekends. Overnight parking is prohibited in the Tiger Avenue Parking Structure, Residential Life parking lots and surface lots marked as restricted. Open public parking is allowed in the Conley Avenue, Turner Avenue and University Avenue garages between 6 p.m. and 7 a.m. every day. Levels 1-3 of the Virginia Avenue garage and levels 1-4 of the Hitt Street will also be open to the public during those hours.

The parking management changes come from a review of MU parking operations by the company NuPark. McCune said NuPark manages the permit system and helped MU implement its enforcement policy. According to previous Tribune reporting, NuPark uses car-mounted cameras to read license plates and run them through a database of permit holders. If a car is not in the database or its assigned lot, enforcement staff will issue a ticket if necessary.

MU got rid of parking permit tags and adopted the NuPark system in the fall of 2016. NuPark was supposed to increase fine collections by 25 percent and permit sales by 5 to 10 percent. The increases were expected to add $366,000 to $498,000 in revenue. McCune said in an email that the university does not have data to properly test this hypothesis because it made several adjustments during its first year using NuPark. MU expects to gain more revenue via stricter parking enforcement even though it reduced its permit sales, McCune said.

The university encourages students to carpool, walk, bike or take public transportation to campus, McCune said. Some apartment complexes provide shuttles to and from campus. MU provides the Tiger Line shuttle between campus and the perimeter parking lots in partnership with the City of Columbia.

City councilman Michael Trapp was a member of the recently disbanded Parking and Traffic Management Task Force. He said the decrease in the number of core campus parking permits might increase traffic congestion downtown if students decide they still want to drive to campus. If they do not find the parking they are looking for downtown, he said, they will soon find other, more efficient ways to get to their classes.

tvrbin@columbiatribune.com