Vehicle stickers are considered necessary to keep entrance and exit from METU under control, to minimize the security gaps, and to allow those who have stickers to enter and leave the campus more rapidly. However, despite its name, the sticker is in the form of a rough and heavy plastic box, which makes it harder to stick it on the glass and to keep it there. There are some problems in the use of stickers due to the loss of adhesive in especially hot weather, hardening and bending of plastic in the sun, falling the sticker off the glass due to its weight, which cause technical challenges in their detection or reading.  It would be better to use HGS-like tags instead of current stickers or plate recognition systems with a camera; therefore, the plates identified in the system can automatically allow to pass through the gates and the stickers can be prevented to be used by different cars.  If the current application continues;

· ODTU TEKNOKENT vehicle stickers issued by METU, which are allowed to pass through Gate A1 for now due to road construction but cannot use this gate normally, should be allowed to enter the campus through the Gate A1. 

·  A uniform card application should be initiated and cars with stickers should enter the campus through all the gates.

· Within the scope of university industry cooperation, Teknokent employees are required to have an ODTÜ TEKNOKENT (provided by Domestic Services) stickers in order to move to the METU side, which causes a problem for them. 

· After entering the campus through the Gate A4, it is not necessary to check again for access to Teknokent at the Gate A8. 

· Putting the Gates A2 and A9 into service and allowing the vehicles with ODTU Teknokent and College stickers to pass through these gates as well would reduce the traffic at METU Campus significantly.

· The Teknokent sticker fees charged by Teknokent for only once should also apply to the ODTU Teknokent vehicle sticker charged by the Office of Domestic Affairs each year.

·  The fees of the ODTU TEKNOKENT stickers (Provided by Office of Domestic Services) are high.

·  The expiration date of stickers should be 1 year from the date of purchase of the sticker instead of from the end of the academic year.

·  Those who have a second car should not be allowed to use their stickers on the other car and there should be an additional card, etc.

·  The expiration date of stickers should be longer for students (only if they continue studying).  

·  Multi-storey car parks should be constructed in specific areas and the campus should be closed to traffic for cars after a certain hour and ring buses should be in use.

Opinions of Teknokent Company

In my opinion, it is a discrimination to give different colors of vehicle stickers based on the positions of the persons (academic-administrative) and for other reasons, and to allow vehicles to park in different places. It does not make any sense that people who do the same job in the same building or even in the same room are discriminated and treated differently as academic-administrative.  In addition, there are points that I find unreasonable in the vehicle stickers given to students. It would be a fairer approach if the vehicle sticker fees are determined in proportion to the tax paid to the state.

İbrahim Çalışır - Engineer

Computer Center

The main issue is that the sticker implementation is not designed to encourage the traffic on campus. This, in fact, requires reorganization of the overall traffic on campus. Therefore, a comprehensive traffic planning is a must. I think there has been an increase in the number of staff and students who have been coming to the campus driving their own cars in recent years. This has brought up the sticker issue. First of all, the question “How can we take this sticker issue off the agenda?” should be asked. The debate over stickers’ being cheap for the staff or expensive for students seems to me to be a rather secondary controversy. I think it would be more appropriate that the student shuttle buses that were in use until recently should be on the agenda again.

Asst.  Prof. Çağatay Topal

METU Department of Sociology

As someone who did not pay any money to the vehicle stickers from the first year of my undergraduate studies at METU (I was enrolled at METU with a high score from the university placement exam, so the sticker was free to me) to the ninth semester of being a research assistant, I have not been able to understand for many years the policy that METU has followed about the vehicle stickers. If this is implemented to decrease the vehicle traffic on campus, why is that the vehicles with an academic sticker, like mine, do not have to pay the same fees? You only pay a small card fee at first to get the academic sticker, and you do not pay at all to renew it again. But why? Do the cars of the faculty members not cause overcrowding on campus? Keeping student sticker fees high to reduce vehicle traffic on campus would not be a solution; as there might be people who are always willing to pay such high prices. Instead of this practice, it seems more appropriate to put a quota for brown stickers in each department as such in yellow stickers and to reduce prices. If the school needs money from the vehicle stickers, the annual fee for the academic and administrative vehicle stickers must apply instead of taking all the money out of the students.

Res. Asst. Enis Kobal

Electric and Electronical Engineering, METU EE’13 

*While "Plainspoken" section of the second issue was being prepared, prices of the stickers were reduced by 50% to 300 TL. In addition, admission of the graduates to the campus has been regulated as 20.00.