I saw that sign years ago when we visited the Berkeley campus with my daughter. They are just bragging, but it's priceless!
It's one of those weird things. I recall when all it said on the parking sign was "NL" which wasn't that informative if you didn't know what it was. I'd seen a few of the cars parked in those spaces, and one prof had an old DeSoto.
It's been copied at other places. This one can only be used by Professor Yuan T. Lee at National Taiwan University, who is the only faculty member with a Nobel Prize. He won it while at UC Berkeley, although he eventually returned to Taiwan after retiring.
This prof was the only Nobel Prize winner at the University of Missouri, and he got his own dedicated bike parking rack, although I where I've gone to school remember seeing a few professors just take their bikes into their offices. But he says he'll fix any tickets.
Mizzou honors Nobel Laureate with parking space, for his bike
showme.missouri.edu
Smith doesn't plan on being greedy with his space.
"If you want to park your bike in the space, please do," Smith said. "If you get a ticket, come see me. I'll take care of it."
I mentioned my student parking. I went that one year where I got the book of daily passes, although I screwed up because I didn't know that it was one book for the whole year and not just the semester. I thought I could buy another one for spring. But three of four years I got a regular student parking permit, which was a hang tag. I could either prepay for a calendar month and place a sticker on the permit, or pay a daily parking fee. When I had the monthly, I could park in better lots at night and weekends. We also had assorted machines. I think my first year it was just 75 cents a day and most of the machines were mechanical ones where I needed quarters to get serial numbered tickets. I'm not sure how they knew if it was purchased on a specific day. They also had these electronic dispensers that printed the date of purchase and where I could select a daily student rate. I think by my senior year, daily student parking was up to maybe $5.