STORRS, Conn. (WTNH)– Newly released data shows UConn issued nearly $1 million in parking tickets last year. But are there really parking issues at UConn or are students just disobeying the rules?

Parking is a hot button issue where students say there’s not enough places to park but the University says it would be OK if students just didn’t park where they’re not supposed to.

In 2018, the University of Connecticut issued almost $1 million in parking fines.

“I have a couple of friends I know who are so over getting tickets they don’t even pay them anymore and they’ll just park wherever they want,” said Gabbi Little, a junior.

A recent UConn graduate seeking to fine tune his data analyzation skills requested the raw parking data from the university to see if the department’s so-called bad reputation was earned

So he analyzed the data and turned it over to the school newspaper.

“All the data was laid out perfectly for me,” said Nick Smith, Campus Correspondent, The Daily Campus.

Last year parking services issued nearly 40,000 individual tickets.

“Just about 10 percent of their total tickets for the year they write them in the first week of classes, but almost 99 percent of those tickets are warnings,” said Smith.

The university promptly shared the same data with News 8 Monday. A university spokesman says parking is not an easy issue for any college campus. Most of the tickets were issued for cars parked in the wrong place and expired meters.

But the university didn’t collect nearly $1 million back from students. About 20 percent of tickets were appealed, of which more than half were then overturned.

“The data seems to suggest if you get a parking ticket, it might be worth your while to go through the appeals process because it seems to be about a coin flip,” said Smith.

As for the question that sparked the data collection in the first place: does parking services deserve its so-called bad reputation.

“I guess it’s still up in the air but the data certainly revealed some interesting things,” said Smith.

It turns out most of these tickets are written on Mondays – the first day of classes for the week. About 25 percent.