From CSGSA

Parking near campus tends to be a pain, especially on weekdays. For one's daily commute, it's well worth seeing if you can avoid the need to park near campus by bicycling or using public transit.

There are a number of parking options near Soda Hall.

On the street

On-street pay-and-display parking: 1 and 2 hour, regularly enforced. $1.25 per hour on weekdays and Saturdays, free and unlimited on Sundays and after 6 pm. At other times, there are usually at least some one-hour spaces open around Soda Hall, since we don't get tons of short-term visitors.

Residential Permit area parking: free 2-hour limit parking. These are found in the neighborhood starting one block north of Hearst. The nice thing about these is that you may not have to actually move your car every 2 hours, just check whether its tires have been chalked. The further from campus, the less likely that this will happen (but the further you will have to walk). These spaces are free and unlimited on weekends and after 7pm (i.e., no problem if you park after 5).

If you venture out far enough, you can find spots where in the neighborhood you can park all day on weekdays without a permit. These are pretty far away though (the nearest I know of is 7 or 8 blocks).

In the city of Berkeley, loading zones are not enforced on Sunday or after 6 pm unless posted otherwise [1]. Not everyone knows this, so the loading zone across from Soda is worth checking.

Nearby spots can be hard to find during the busiest times. One suggested search strategy is to start by making progressively larger arcs to the NE of Hearst + Euclid then fall back to the NW quadrant where the religious colleges are.

Learn to parallel park on really steep hills. Avoid slipping backward at high speed and taking out the front end of the cheap import behind you (this from painful experience). Avoid driving into campus on football Saturdays if at all possible.

Some good advice for parking your car, especially in sketchier places than northside: lock of course, but also make sure to put any valuable-looking items (purse, backpack, laptop case, briefcase of poker chips that looks like it contains handguns or fat stacks of cash) out of sight in the trunk, where it won't entice someone to break a window to grab it.

Off the street

University garage (Lower Hearst Parking structure): has public parking on Level 2 (entrance on Scenic), which is not cheap but you don't have to worry about moving your car. Pricing is $3 for the first hour, between $1 and $2 per additional hour. If you live far enough from campus (about 3+ miles), you can also get semester-long parking permits from the University. Tip from Ben Rubinstein: two carpool permits are cheaper than one regular permit, so if you always drive in with someone else you may be able to save some money that way. Student carpool permits are $125 per semester; regular student permits are $355 [2]. No one checks who parks the car, so you don't even need to physically carpool, just have two carpool parking permits displayed in the parked car.

I've also heard of nearby apartments and businesses leasing out extra spaces, but availability would be limited and I'm not sure how one would find out about most of them.