Now standing five stories high on the site where Cain Hall once stood, campus’ newest parking garage was fully operational for A&M’s game against UCLA Saturday.
Cain Hall was torn down last year to make way for the new campus parking garage. Cain Hall used to host Disability Services and Student Counseling Services, but was replaced by an extra space for parking, Cain Garage, with accompanying plans for an on-campus hotel as well. 
Construction of Cain Garage began promptly after the destruction of Cain Hall in Spring 2016. Former A&M President R. Bowen Loftin originally had the idea to attract local and national conferences to benefit the A&M academic community, according to Phillip Ray, Vice Chancellor for Business Affairs at the Texas A&M University System.
Ray said while the contractual completion date for the garage was originally set for Oct. 15, the parking garage’s construction was about five weeks ahead of schedule. 
“We were able to get [the garage] open and fully functional, with 1,400 spaces that were available on our Sept. 3 football game,” Ray said. “We were very pleased with that and thought it did a great job in helping the game day traffic.”
 Ray said the remaining construction for Cain Garage will include cosmetic touchups on the exterior of the garage, along with completing the full landscape by Oct. 8  when A&M hosts Tennessee.
 “It is going to be shining like a new penny on the outside, just like it is on the inside, now,” Ray said.
 Ray said typically it takes much longer to construct a working and usable parking garage than the amount of time it took the contractor, Gilbane Construction.
 “We’re very pleased to get to finish Cain Garage that many spaces ready in that short of a construction period. There were probably about six months of construction to do a poured-in-place, five-level garage like that,” Ray said. “It’s almost unheard of — especially to do it ahead of schedule with the weather we fought through this summer.”
 Kyle Field, the MSC and Albritton Tower encompass the construction site that includes the new garage, Ray said. As this is such a high-traffic area at A&M, building a parking garage seemed a feasible solution to combatting high traffic and inadequate parking availability on campus, Ray said.
 Remington Chess, human resources development junior, said it will be beneficial to have more parking options on campus.
 “I definitely think it will help with the high traffic on that part of campus, but I can see how it could cause traffic if [the garage] is too full and not regulated,” Chess said.