MLK Student Union Garage

I like to take BART to Berkeley, but on Wednesdays, I have overnight shifts before and after the middle-​of-​the-​afternoon class I must attend at Berkeley, so I drive to save time and sleep. (This doesn’t always work, though; I happened to be driving across the Bay Bridge the day the Safeway truck crashed. I got exactly forty-​eight minutes of sleep between two twelve-​hour overnight shifts that week.)
When I do drive, I normally park on the street in the neighborhood south of campus. But the maximum is two hours, so when I have office hours or am late for work or whatever, my garage of choice is the structure beneath the MLK Student Union building. I’m always afraid that someone’s going to wake up to the fact that parking is way too cheap here, but the rates have been about the same for the past three or four years. It’s not Southern California cheap, but by Bay Area standards, it’s a steal. There aren’t a whole lot of spaces (107), but I’ve never seen the lot actually full.
They do close it for event-​only parking sometimes, especially on Thursdays for some reason, but you can often still park here on those days – as long as they don’t have a poor student worker sitting there to tell people not to park here.
Because Bancroft is a one-​way street running west, the entrance to this lot can be hard to find. Take College or Telegraph north and turn left on Bancroft. Be sure to get in the right lane, and start looking for the entrance right after the bus stop. Also, watch out for pedestrians; Berkeley students may be some of the brightest in California, but they seem to lose all their intelligence when they’re in crosswalks. Yes, you have the right of way, but the right of way does not stop speeding cars. Or even slow-​moving ones.