The administration within the transportation department has decided to alter payments in the Dan Allen pay lot.

Students will now be expected to pay for parking in debit and credit as opposed to cash. A date for the change is still pending and has not yet been specified.

Ronnie Wright, the assistant director for finance in the transportation department, said that the change will be temporary.

“We are getting to design the bottom of the Dan Allen parking deck so that all of it is a pay lot,” Wright said. “It’s an experiment for how the students will feel about the use of credit. These machines are an interim solution for the plans for the future.”

Scott Compton, a junior in technology education, said that for some, the change could be an inconvenience.

“A lot of people might not be too happy because it is important for people to be able to spend cash,” Compton said. “Some people don’t have credit or don’t want to use credit. For the general public on a whole they might want to consider an alternative.”

Compton said though that personally he liked the idea of credit only payments.

“It’d be better for me because you’ll be able to get through faster,” Compton said. “I like it for security reasons because it’s a public parking lot.”

Wright said he believed that there was substantial evidence to show that the overall preferred method of payment by students and visitors in the parking deck was credit.

“On a typical day credit card payments run well over twice the amount of cash payments,” Wright said. “Credit card payments are the way students prefer to go.”

Christine Klein, the information and communication specialist of the transportation department, said the students need to know about the changes in payments.

“What we are seeing is that most students are paying by credit card,” Klein said. “To begin with there will be MasterCard and Visa.”

Wright said the credit machines are an excellent solution both for the administration of transportation and to the demand of students who use credit.

“Parking equipment is somewhat expensive — one of the cheapest solutions to the problem is getting the credit only machines,” he said. “The advantage of the credit is you may pay for the time you have. One of the disadvantages of cash is you may not pay for the time you spend at the spaces.”

Clifford Sandy, a freshman in business management, said he would prefer credit to cash.

“It will help because money is just a card these days,” Sandy said. “With everything being in credit it is going to start being more convenient, and on computers you can look it up anytime.”

Thomas Kendig, the director of the transportation department, said he is confident that the change will benefit both administration and students as well.

“New machines hopefully soon will be the only machines,” Kendig said.