Parking On The Stanford Campus


Introduction to Parking on Campus:

Stanford is renowned for offering a challenging academic environment. Another challenging area of Stanford life is parking. It can be very difficult to find a place to park at certain times of the day, but at least it's expensive.

Parking Fees and Permits:

For occasional visitors to campus, metered parking and "Pay and Display" lots are available. Look for the green P rectangles on the campus map. or alternate campus map, both .pdf files.

The searchable campus map is an excellent resource for locating places on campus.

Metered parking presently costs $1.50/hour. As with most most parking on campus, it is enforced between the hours of 6AM and 4PM, Monday - Friday. For all day parking, students may find it more convenient or more economical to buy a one day parking permit (scratcher). A scratcher is a cardboard permit that you hang from your rear view mirror. To "activate" it, you scratch a coating off of the day, month and year areas corresponding to the date of use, not unlike playing a lottery ticket. The scratcher is then used up and cannot be used again.

HCP students can buy scratchers at 340 Bonair Siding Road during business hours. It's not clear that NDO students are entitled to buy scratchers. If not, perhaps a needy NDO student could make contact with a helpful HCP student. I promise to look the other way.

Members of the general public are entitled to buy daily visitor parking permits (visitor scratchers) at the extortionate price of $12.00 each. A visitor scratcher permits all day parking for one day only. They are available at various locations around campus; the bookstore has the best hours. See the (visitor parking page) for more information.

Another alternative for all day parking, if you're out of scratchers and don't have half a pound of quarters, is Parking Structure 3 at the Medical Center (Hospital). This is run like a normal parking garage; you take a ticket when you enter and pay as you leave. All day parking is $10. Parking here is considered a deep, dark secret, so don't tell anyone. Parking Structure 3 is about a 10 minute walk from Gates.

Here is an up-to-date parking map. Also, here's a route map for the Marguerite free shuttle, The Marguerite schedule, an area shuttle map and a local transit map.

Destinations of Interest:

The center of the computer science universe is the Gates Information Sciences building. Parking Structure 1 is convenient to Gates, and offers both metered parking (coins and visitor scratchers) and permit parking (A permits only).

An important destination for CS106 students is the Tressider Lair, a Macintosh computer cluster, located on the second floor of Tressider Union. Tressider is also home to Jamba Juice, various purveyors of comestibles and the CoHo (coffee house), and features one of the least energy efficient architectures in the Western Hemisphere.

The Tressider Lot has parking meters and permit parking, and is convenient to Tressider, the Bookstore and Sweet Hall.

The Stanford Center for Professional Development (SITN) is located on the third floor of Durand. Metered parking is usually available by Parking Structure 2, but is a bit of a hike. Closer parking is available in the Northeast corner of this parking lot, near Santa Teresa Street. A grand total of 6 parking meters are installed there.

Directions to Campus:

Here is a useful link providing directions to campus.