Parking & U: Reduce Parking on Campus & Reap Benefits
by KatieAgain, courtesy of Angelina Lopez, Transit for Livable Communities’ Communications/Media Relations intern.
A month ago, Fresh Energy’s Elena Velkov advocated increasing bus use for universities. As a complement, I would like to share the work of some of my classmates at Macalester College to use transportation demand management principles to reduce parking requirements and demand at universities, colleges, and seminaries.
Transit for Livable Communities‘ The Myth of Free Parking (2003) and UCLA Professor Donald Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking (Planners Press, 2005) both point to the “hidden costs & unexpected consequences,” caused by an oversupply of parking. In Spring 2007, a graduate course at MIT investigated parking and alternative transit on their campus and discovered that parking cost the university a whopping $11 million dollars, only $3 million of which is paid for by the parkers themselves.[1]
Besides saving the direct expenses of facilities, reducing parking has a number of other benefits. Less parking can equate to more green space on campus, which can help with stormwater management, water pollution, heat island effects, and developing an attractive environment. And of course, fewer cars on the roads equals a smaller carbon footprint for the institution. With 437 current signatories to the President’s Climate Commitment, reducing parking represents an important step towards climate neutrality of higher education institutions.
Given that a reduction in parking cannot come alone, how do we manage transportation demand? Mark Stonehill ’09 and Asa Diebolt ’09 have been investigating the possibility of allowing campuses to qualify for reduced minimum parking requirements through the implementation of an individualized transportation plan from a given ‘toolkit.’ Each aspect could qualify the school for a certain reduction in the requirement. Myriad ‘tools’ reduce parking demand on a given campus—public transit incentive programs such as Metropass, car sharing like HourCar, bicycle parking, and bicycle share programs are among those that an institution could implement voluntarily. By restricting who qualifies to park, how much parking costs the user, as well as managing spillover into surrounding communities through permits, the institution can use it’s policies to reduce demand for space. Location along a street with sufficient transit service could also merit reductions. The plan is not about eliminating all parking, but about developing needed and smart alternatives.
Universities, colleges, and seminaries teach students not only in the classroom, but also in how they operate and how they manage their physical space. They are far from the only institutions which have the potential to implement important transportation management change, but they have a unique position to effect and influence change.
