Next year's freshmen will have to wait until they are juniors to legally park on campus.
Sophomores will be barred from keeping cars on campus beginning in September 2009 after administrators adopted a measure to stem a potential parking shortage.
The ruling will not directly affect any current undergraduates.
"With [the renovation of] 80 George St., the new gym renovation and other new construction projects coming up, the university is anticipating that we are going to have a parking problem on campus in the near future," said John King, director of Public and Environmental Safety. "As we approach the next few years, we have to be careful managing our parking program and this seemed like the best solution to fix the problem."
The Office of the Dean of Student Affairs, the Department of Public and Environmental Safety and Vice President of Operations John Roberto made the decision together, King said.
"As we looked at the overall parking [situation], we decided that we need to find a way to increase parking or reduce demand," he said. "Of course increasing supply has a cost attached to it and so the prudent approach for the time being was to eliminate sophomore parking."
When asked about whether there were plans to eventually reverse the new rule, King said, "For the foreseeable future, sophomores will not be allowed to park on campus. We're just going to have to see how things occur as time goes on."
According to Dean of Student Affairs Bruce Reitman, members of the incoming Class of 2012 have been notified in their admission materials that they will not be allowed to park on campus during their sophomore year.
"We thought it would be fair to let the incoming class know in advance," he said.
Students' reactions to the new parking regulation have been mixed.
"This new rule may pose a problem to some students, [but] I don't think that the rule is unfair," freshman Hanson Gong said. "There are so many other schools that don't allow freshmen or sophomores to have cars at all. Even so, [it is a] good thing that this affects the incoming class and our class gets to keep our parking."
Other students were less understanding.
"When I first heard of the news, I was surprised that they were going to cut out the sophomore parking option completely," freshman Matt Steinberg said. The administration "should be able to find somewhere off campus that they can block off as Tufts parking for sophomores. It would be better than simply not offering any parking opportunities at all."
According to Tufts University Police Department Captain Mark Keith, this new rule was not in response to repeated incidences of juniors and seniors buying parking decals for sophomores, allowing the underclassmen to park in the Carmichael Hall parking lot instead of behind Hill Hall or Cousens Gymnasium.
