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.)
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.)