Parking and Transit Services will put more than 350 parking decals for an underused parking lot and structure up for sale Saturday morning.
PTS will offer 138 decals for Lot 16 and 244 decals for Structure 7 to students from 8 a.m. to noon at its office in The Towers, located on Fifth Street between Forest and College avenues.
New customers will pay $230 for a decal in either location. Students who trade in a Lot 59 decal for a new parking spot will be charged $155.
Lot 16 is located near University Drive and Mill Avenue. Structure 7 is at the south end of Lot 59 in the northeast corner of the Tempe campus.
Recent PTS usage counts found both parking areas were used at a rate below the target of 90 percent, said Mark Krug, PTS spokesman.
"[At 90 percent] we're safe in making sure it's not oversold but ... those spaces don't just sit there empty either," Krug said.
After the first two weeks of each semester, PTS officials monitor how parking areas are used from approximately 7 a.m. to 8 or 9 p.m., Krug said.
"We have a representative out at each structure and lot during pretty much all hours of the University day," he said.
Krug said usage counts are still underway and are continued throughout the year. He said if PTS finds other lots and structures are underused, it would sell more decals for those locations.
Also, some Structure 7 decals available before the semester started had not been sold, he said.
"We never reached our capacity for Structure 7, and after lot-utilization counts, more [spaces] were available," Krug said.
More spaces were also added after the ASU Foundation parking garage opened last year, Krug said.
Many spaces for decal holders in Lot 16 had previously been reserved for visitors, but officials decided to convert many of those spaces when the Foundation parking garage added about 600 visitor spots to the campus.
"That way there'd be another surface lot on campus that would provide access to the west side of campus," he said.
Krug said the available decals would only be sold at the office and not through PTS's online system because he expects many of the decals to go to students upgrading from another lot or structure.
"You can't do that type of upgrade online anyway," Krug said. "We thought this would be the most fair for anybody who wanted to purchase one of those permits."
Parking decals are still available at the West campus, said West campus parking manager Jim Sayre.
"Thus far, with the history of the West campus, we have never stopped [selling decals]," he said.
He added that he does not expect that to change this semester.
A "substantial amount of parking spaces" were available at West campus even during the busy first week of school this year, Sayre said.
He credited the recent opening of a 540-space temporary lot for the availability and said West campus parking authorities are working to find an acceptable rate of use as the campus begins to grow.
"We've never had a problem like Tempe [campus], so we haven't had to monitor it as closely," Sayre said.
He said West campus parking officials currently check parking usage with more infrequent counts.
"They haven't found it to be a problem that didn't really require on the hour every hour [counts] or something that frequent," Sayre said.
Parking officials from the Polytechnic campus did not return calls requesting comment.
Reach the reporter at brian.indrelunas@asu.edu.
