With new ticketing habits, Rider creates cash, confusion

By Jake Tiger

Ryan Kiriloff stepped outside into the biting air of late winter in New Jersey, having just completed a typical 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. shift. 

An accountancy master’s student, Kiriloff is spending his fifth and final year at Rider as a graduate assistant at the Academic Success Center, tutoring and manning the front desk. His five hours of work paid him about $65, he said.

Exiting the Bart Luedeke Center and walking up to his car, Kiriloff saw something that was foreign to him even after almost five years on campus: a stark white slip pinned to his windshield.

He looked up to see his rearview mirror unadorned. He forgot he had taken down his parking pass the previous day.

For the first time in five years, Kiriloff had gotten a ticket. A $250 one at that.

“I just felt very upset.… My whole shift was down the drain,” he said with a smirk of both annoyance and disbelief. “Maybe they could let me off with a warning or something like that. This is the only time in five years I’ve made this error, so maybe there’d be a little bit of leniency. Nope.”

Upon appealing the ticket, Kiriloff said the fee was lowered to $50 for failure to display his parking pass, but even forking over the reduced amount made him feel cheated, calling it “predatory” and “uncalled for.”

“It hurt, to be perfectly honest.… Somehow I just feel like I’m getting screwed out of $50,” he said. “This is the only donation they’ll ever receive from me now.”

Kiriloff is not alone in his shock and frustration, as Rider Public Safety’s conscious effort to be more strict with parking enforcement has led to officers inking tickets at a drastically higher rate than years past and many other students being cited for the first time.

The sudden shift also led to a flood of ticket appeals from students who feel confused, outraged, powerless or a combination of the three; meanwhile, some of their peers have found ways to sidestep the system completely.

While it is unclear how well it has resonated with the student body, it is apparent that Public Safety wanted to send a message in the fall 2024 semester: Follow the new policy or get a ticket.

A conscious effort

After making $113,880 in parking tickets and fees the prior year, Rider projected it would make about $500,000 in the 2023-24 academic year—almost five times as much—largely from its new, $250 student parking fee, according to Chief Financial Officer James Hartman.

While its introduction was much-maligned by students, permits of this ilk are commonplace in higher education, with peer institutions like Montclair State University, The College of New Jersey and Seton Hall University all charging north of $300 in annual parking fees. Full-time residential students at the New Jersey Institute of Technology must pay $490 each semester.

In the throes of a post-pandemic financial squeeze where liquidity is more valuable than ever, imposing a parking fee was a clear and obvious way for the university to bring in needed cash while still not charging as much as other institutions.

University Operations Vice President Mike Reca, who oversees Public Safety, said, “We were one of the last ones and we realized it, and we knew that [charging students for parking] could help with reinvestment, so our sin for probably not pursuing it sooner.”

Rider saw quite a bit more money as a result of its new parking fee, collecting $409,530, but that total still fell just about $90,000 shy of the projection. Reca said this shortfall was due to a number of reasons, including more residential students not having a car on campus because of the fee and students getting away with not buying a permit due to a lack of enforcement on Public Safety’s end.

He also said students started parking on the streets of the White Pine apartment complex beyond Rider’s southern treeline and walking to campus from there to avoid buying a permit.

After these realizations Public Safety made the decision, according to Reca, to be more forceful with its parking enforcement beginning in the fall 2024 semester, a choice that became painfully evident to students.

Officers could more frequently be seen walking from car to car writing tickets, and even before he got his first ticket, Kiriloff said he could feel things had changed from his first four years at Rider.

“Definitely a dramatic increase without a doubt,” Kiriloff said. “I remember people getting away with [violations] for 10, 15 days before hearing from Public Safety at all.”

According to ticketing data provided by Public Safety, October 2024’s 1,759 tickets were the most of any month at Rider since at least 2016.

As of November 2024, the most recent data provided by Public Safety, Rider had already brought in $486,952 from parking fines and tickets, nearly hitting the $500,00 projection less than five full months into the fiscal year.

At Rider’s Student Government Association’s student town hall on Nov. 14, 2024, former Public Safety Director James Waldon said Public Safety had not made an “intentional effort” to increase enforcement of parking violations.

On March 5, Reca said Waldon’s statement was incorrect and he was unsure why the former director would have said that.

“We did a lot of courtesy warnings,” Reca said in a March 20 phone interview. “That’s where we were really aggressive in getting the word out to people.… We didn’t hit everybody right away. We made a very conscious effort to try and create awareness by putting courtesy warnings on vehicles.”

In contrast to Reca’s claims, Public Safety’s data showed a decrease in warnings in fall 2024 despite a marked increase in ticketing. Compared to the same months in 2023, Public Safety gave out 96 more tickets and 36 fewer warnings in September 2024, and 1,084 more tickets and 87 fewer warnings in October 2024.

Looking at whole semesters, Public Safety wrote 11.79 tickets per warning in fall 2024, more than double the 5.45 tickets per warning of fall 2023, according to the data.

When asked about this discrepancy, Reca said, “I can’t speak to that. I don’t know the data behind it, the reasoning behind it.”

Public Safety Director Matthew Babcock said the dip in warnings from 2023 to 2024 could be a result of the years’ differing grace periods. Being the first semester of Rider’s new parking fee, Rider Public Safety waited “four or five weeks” to start ticketing in 2023 rather than the regular two-week period, giving out warnings for decal-related violations during that time.

Still, 2024’s simultaneous ticketing spike and warning slump are demonstrative of the forcefulness Public Safety has adopted in an attempt to hold the student body accountable.

“The conscious effort was made to try and make sure it was equitable for everybody,” Reca said. “We couldn’t have people who were skirting the system and not paying the fee. … There had to be [a more firm approach] because we had to enforce the decal.”

A convenience problem

While some Rider students are content with parking for free at an off-campus apartment complex or driving over patches of grass to sneak into gated lots, others feel it is sometimes difficult just to find something decent and worth a $250 price tag.

Kiriloff said, “Most people are just breaking down and getting the parking pass, but some people aren’t even parking on campus anymore,” adding that he knew somebody who had gotten away with parking in a staff lot for the entire spring semester and was yet to be caught.

Sophomore criminal justice major Aiya Rabah, who commutes 45 minutes to campus, said that by the time she gets to campus around 9 a.m., the commuter spaces next to the BLC are full and she must circle back to the overflow lot along Rider’s southern treeline. Her longer walk to the Fine Arts building often makes her late for class, she said, negatively impacting her grade.

“[My lateness is] a recurring thing and I hate that my professors have come to expect that from me,” Rabah said. “I try to uphold a certain standard for myself…so that’s just a behavior that I’m not proud of but also can’t control.”

Rabah said she would be willing to pay an additional fee of up to $100 for a reserved, convenient parking spot.

Reca has often said, “We [Rider] don’t have a parking problem; we have a convenience problem.” The university has more than enough spots to accommodate its regular flow of students, according to Reca, with about 700 remaining empty each day. 

Problems arise when considering the locations of Rider’s vacant spots, as most of the empty spaces are distant and inconvenient, so much so that students will risk parking in an unauthorized lot just to be a touch closer to the heart of campus. 

According to a spring 2025 survey of Rider students’ parking experiences, 56.7% of 244 respondents said they received a ticket for parking in an incorrect lot because the correct one was full. Rabah said she often sees residential students parking in the commuter lot, forcing her elsewhere.

Rider has multiple open lots that are available to any student with a parking permit, but these lots tend to be on the fringe of campus, creating a longer walk for students.

Reca said the university’s campus was designed to push vehicular traffic to the perimeter, making it a safer, more pedestrian campus.

“Walking is not a bad thing. You can walk this campus in 12 minutes from front to back,” Reca said. “When it’s snowy or windy…it sucks, but that’s the hand we’re dealt.”

A communication breakdown

Community Standards Director Keith Kemo, who has overseen parking ticket appeals for 25 years, said last semester was “definitely” the most hectic he could recall.

Rider’s ticket appeals board saw an unprecedented number of submissions during the fall 2024 semester. Since 2017, the board has seen 2,418 total appeals; 908 (37.5%) came last semester alone.

After hearing so many appeals, Dean of Students Christine Mehlhorn believed the downpour of appeals resulted from a combination of a change in policy and a breakdown in communication.

“There was a lack of understanding in the change in policy and what students had to do to be in compliance, so that’s what I think…ultimately caused the uptick,” Mehlhorn said. “When [students] don’t understand something, it’s kind of natural to feel like, ‘Well, I didn’t get this information. I didn’t understand what was being expected of me.’”

Mehlhorn’s theory tracks with the overall sentiments among students, as 72.4% of participants in the parking survey said they believed they were mistakenly or wrongly ticketed. Additionally, 67.4% said they appealed at least one ticket.

Students contested violations at an immensely high rate during the fall 2024 semester, with tickets being appealed 30.3% of the time as opposed to 6.1% in fall 2023.

All signs point to a near ubiquitous lack of communication when implementing the new changes, or perhaps slow adaptation from students in the face of what they perceive as a sudden, drastic change in Public Safety’s role.

Rabah, the criminal justice sophomore, said of her first year on campus, “I really wasn’t convinced that they gave out tickets.…My classmates would tell me, ‘Oh, you don’t have to park in the freshman lot. No one checks.’…This year, everyone’s really frustrated with getting tickets. The last thing you want to see at the end of all of your exams is a ticket on your windshield.”

As far as communication goes, Reca said Public Safety sent out email reminders regarding the new policy changes, what students’ expectations were and how to purchase a permit.

There were two identical emails from Waldon, one on Aug. 23, 2024, and one on Oct. 4, 2024. The emails read, “The Department of Public Safety will be enforcing the parking permit requirement and those vehicles without a proper permit will be ticketed.”

Reca said, “The more I talk to students, it sounds like email is not a great vehicle. … Based on all of the information we’ve received, we’re reevaluating the whole process.”

To help get students and Public Safety on the same page, Rabah recommended a monthly forum where Public Safety could have open discussions with students about aspects of campus life, rather than just “complaining on Fizz,” an anonymous social media platform for Rider students.

“I respect that they’re doing their jobs…and I don’t want to make it sound like they’re in the wrong for trying to make parking efficient and safe for everybody,” Rabah said. “At the end of the day, opening spaces to directly communicate with students is really important.”

This story is part of a parking series, a project credited by Rider’s In-Depth Reporting class. The project will go live by May 1 at https://ridercomm.wpenginepowered.com/