Mass transportation options coupled with high density buildings should be the way to go. Parking just doesn’t scale.
The uni I went to had a decent bus system that had routes along the major apt complexes (private and uni owner). Buses were usually on time, and likely faster than trying to find a parking spot.
It's great if you have them, but the more common situation seems to be to jack up parking prices while transit is still abysmal.
At Georgia Tech there was a bus that ran once every 15 minutes to the subway, and even then you couldn't get everywhere on campus from that bus, you had to take another bus, leading to 20+ minutes of transfers to get anywhere. Bus shelters were mostly nonexistent in winters that featured frequent high winds and rain. Taking the bus was such a miserable experience I ended up skateboarding everywhere, which at least kept me warm.
Yah, UC Davis runs its own bus service (entirely run by students, actually), and has run a decades long psy-ops campaign to get people to ride bikes. It seems to have worked quite well!
But we are talking about what it takes to get lazy Americans to bike. I am well aware of how popular biking is in Copenhagen even though they have comparatively terrible weather. Davis truly has an unusual confluence of factors that make biking more appealing to Americans.
On the other hand, lots of other cities in California and elsewhere have similar circumstances. Meanwhile, Copenhagen has very different circumstances but huge bike uptake.
It's fundamentally about policy. Take the steps, and you'll get the results.
We don't need to mold the whole world into the tightly packed metropolis model. Those areas are fine for people who like that kind of living but a lot of others including me don't.
Make the parking lots more efficiently packed, expand a bit of parking into grassy areas, build a parking garage instead of spending more on sports, there are lots of solutions here.
The thing however is that the tightly packed urban model allows the more rural lifestyles to exist. Designing towns and cities to be densely packed or at least space efficient allows people in those environments to get where they need to go with public transportation, bikes, and walking. This allows these people to get rid of their cars and makes space for people like you who prefer living away from the densely packed landscape to live your life with reduced inconveniences like traffic and lack of parking spaces.
Both lifestyles win out because this isn't trying to eliminate the rural lifestyle, it instead is setting the incentives so that people can and will use the transportation medium most efficient for their lifestyle and distributing the population between different channels of transportation to keep from over-saturating any one of them.
Increasing density is precisely what we must do, because the alternative, car-centric kind of living is this close to giving us an expiration date that’s perceptibly on the horizon.
Towns are fine, it's suburban sprawl that's the problem. If you like the outdoors and wilderness, you should want more people to live in the city so they don't tarnish the countryside. I would really like to see hunters start getting along with urbanists, they have more in common than they know.
That's easy to say when you are largely insulated by the effects due to wealth, which not coincendentally was derived from an economic system that created the crisis in the first place.
That cavalier attitude cannot be adopted by the estimated 300M refugees climate change is projected to create over the next few decades.
You don’t have to be manhattan-lite. You can totally be Tokyo-lite instead. Of course one of the main hurdles is America’s race and class problem which caused the segregation and dispersion in the first place.
That's great for urban campuses. But what about suburban and rural ones?
Also: Great, you've got the students covered. What about the faculty and staff? They just have to pay "market rate" for the privilege of parking at their own damn jobs?
(Full disclosure: I work on a rural college campus, where there are chronic problems with parking, and an administration that cares far more about the campus being beautiful than about whether its staff can park within 20 minutes' walk of their job.)
> They just have to pay "market rate" for the privilege of parking at their own damn jobs?
Yes? Why wouldn't they? At the office where I work, yeah if you want a spot in the parking garage, everyone pays. My company has free space for bikes, and they do give people a 'commute allowance' which you could certainly use for that parking if you want. Other people just use the money for public transport, or other random things.
Personally I'm open to compromise, but your attitude of treating having to pay for 100 sq ft of permanent storage at your work as some sort of atrocity is pretty weird to me.
edit: apparently it's a lot more than 100 sq ft
> The average size of a parking space is 320 square feet. Another common size is 270 square feet. These sizes include the landscaping or end of aisle areas, the circulation areas and the parking space. For perpendicular or angled parking spaces, the length is commonly 16 feet to 18 feet. Meanwhile, the standard width is 7.9 feet to 9 feet.
Prefix: I know you were rebutting the idea of rate parking at universities. This reply is just to cover some other possible solutions that are not incompatible with the rate parking idea.
As a student who attends a university that traditionally is considered rural (VT has grown significantly in the past decade, much more than the surrounding towns so I don't know how "rural" we are any more), we struggle with the parking issue as well. This is exacerbated by the housing issue however that's besides the point.
Teachers obviously should get priority with parking and with rate exemption unless there is some exceptional public transportation alternative. If teachers could get by without driving to the school that would be awesome however it obviously isn't feasible since you are permanent residents and likely live further away from campus than students since you can more likely afford the beautiful rural properties.
I could see something like teacher parking sections working well if they were allocated based on need in an area and parking spots converted to also allow student parking when the need for teacher parking was low. Depending on how it's done it could be somewhat complex and require some getting used to however time based zoned parking has worked reasonably well for city residents and I couldn't see it being too difficult to adapt to rural environments.
Our campus has gotten parking decently under control recently excluding the issues due to overcrowding. The things that helped were the free bus system allowing students to use that instead of parking on campus or parking away and taking the bus to campus, those infuriating ride scooters also allowed students to park further away making space for teachers, and the teacher parking spots which convert to generic parking after hours.
We have a lot to improve here but things are at least workable considering our situation. Also this is definitely more apt for a larger college town and I recognise it may not apply to a smaller one however there has to be an analogue that can work for small rural campuses.
A walk on a beautiful campus while going to work does not sound all that terrible. To your point, including free or reduced cost parking for staff and not students sounds reasonable.
- Uphill most of the way (the college is built on the side of a hill)
- In the winter when there's 4 inches of snow on the ground, and the temperature is below 0°F
- And then having to start your job making only a few dollars an hour more than the students who get to sit there and do their homework while on-shift, and having to do parts of two other people's jobs too because turnover is so high
The beauty becomes a background after a while...and yes, as you can see, the college does have other problems that make the parking issue seem much less significant. (I'm fortunate enough that the job I was describing was not mine, but it's not only real, it's far from unique here.)
The uni I went to had a decent bus system that had routes along the major apt complexes (private and uni owner). Buses were usually on time, and likely faster than trying to find a parking spot.