> Obviously, some students thought that fee was ridiculous – just like paying for parking at a university where you’re already paying a hefty tuition fee
I hate parking fees as much as the next person, and totally appreciate the creativity of the people who defeated this device.
However, how should we handle distributing a limited number of parking spaces when there are more people who want to park than available spaces?
If we just say "free to park anywhere!", then there is a good chance you come to school and can't park anywhere (especially if you are not there super early)
You could do a lottery, I guess, but then people who don't need parking might enter the lottery and then sell their spot... making parking even more expensive.
Parking fees seem like a fair way to distribute the limited resource.
My community college had more parking spaces than students on campus at any given time. They then did construction, resulting in one of the largest lots and some of the smaller lots being closed. There was still would have been enough parking for everyone, except they then rented out another parking lot to a pair of local companies. So, we ended up paying for parking when no parking was actually available. This was, of course, after raising the parking fees. The schools initial
response to the problem was to get on campus earlier; which is an absolutely absurd statement for a community college since the demographics include a lot of single mothers and otherwise working adults. Not to mention everyone had to travel to campus because there was no housing. (To top it off, the nearby residents petitioned the city to make their streets permit only. I hope they and their visitors get ticketed regularly.)
So the school expected us to pay more than ever for parking because they wanted to monetize their lot and they didn't even price it high enough to make parking possible for those who could afford to pay. They also did and do charge students to park at night, despite the fact that night classes don't come close to filling the lots.
I'm not much of a stick-it-to-the-man type, but you can bet I found all kinds of creative ways to park and get out of tickets.
> The schools initial response to the problem was to get on campus earlier; which is an absolutely absurd statement for a community college since the demographics include a lot of single mothers and otherwise working adults.
Also, if everyone came earlier in order to get a parking spot, there would still be no spots, because everyone came earlier.
Parking spots (and their demand) are a time constrained resource, so arriving earlier than you need to, even if practical, increases overall demand.
Think about it, if you arrive for a 10am class at 9am, you're now taking up a spot that someone who has class at 9am could be using. You've essentially wasted an hour's use of a limited resource, before you even factor in your personal opportunity cost.
I'm sick of universities not being subject to market forces. Student-aid reform did so much more harm than good, even before you consider student debt. This is just one of the many unintended consequences.
I operated a car pool for several students when I was taking evening classes. This is probably difficult for full time students, but with a little effort would probably work.
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.)
Wouldn't it make sense that the university, that is charging the students all this money, ensure they have enough parking spaces to satisfy likely demand?
Doesn't seem unreasonable for universities with very high tuitions, to provide amenities like reliably available parking.
This is just spreading the cost of parking to people who don't use it... instead of only people who drive their own cars paying for the parking, now everyone has to.
Does the school also pay for public transportation for people who don't drive? Or the extra housing costs of the people who pay extra to live close enough to walk?
This new engineering building is just spreading the cost of classrooms to people who don’t use it.
This new fitness building is just spreading the cost of athletics to people who don’t use it.
The new wheelchair ramps are just spreading the cost of being handicapped to people who don’t use it.
You could apply that logic to all of a college (or life, if you count taxes and insurance) experience. Not everybody is going to use it, but the cost is spread to not disproportionally applied to a single demographic.
To be fair, many college buildings are provided in large part by donations, but I don't think the same is true for parking lots.
Ideally, each student would receive value from the university roughly relative to the tuition they pay, and things that are completely optional should be charged for separately. I think it's reasonable to charge separately for:
- cafeterias
- housing
- tickets to performances
Why should parking be treated separately? Providing parking for free just encourages more parking, which means more pressure to create more parking, etc. Charging for it separately encourages more efficient commutes, whether by bus, bike, walking, or carpooling.
The same goes for cities and other areas with limited resources. Charging for those limited resources encourages more efficient use of those resources, as well as alternatives. Parking is merely one solution to transportation, why should we subsidize it over others?
Which is good. This is what you want in a developed space.
Your own temporary rental space of ~8*12 feet is a luxury. Riding on a bus or bike is not. The latter options should be accommodated with low or non-existent fees.
There are schools that include passes for local transit in their tuition as well. CU Denver did it when I attended about a decade back, and San Francisco State started doing it recently as well.
Universities often disproportionately distribute costs, especially with facilities that are not used by everyone. This should be treated no differently despite the anti-car (or anti-sports, or anti-leisure, or anti-gaming, or anti-phone, etc) sentiment of late.
> Wouldn't it make sense that the university, that is charging the students all this money, ensure they have enough parking spaces to satisfy likely demand?
Does the school offer paid parking permits?
If so, why should students who don't need a parking spot (for whatever reason) need to subsidize those who do?
The high overall cost of tuition is a separate issue, and not one that can be solved by including even more services in the price.
For the same reason that lots of other things are subsidized, paid for even if you don't use them
- school buses and the like
- sporting equipment and facilities
- library
There's lots of services that schools provide, and charge everyone for, because they think it's good for the student body as a while.
Maybe a more controversial one... a school that supplies free transit to/from the local night scene, so that people don't drive to/from bars while intoxicated. It's better for everyone, including locals, for this to exist. However, the non-drinkers, the ones who are nowhere near the night scene, get no benefit from it; they pay for it anyways. And a lot of people would say that's good, and a lot would say it's bad.
Not useful to people that live on campus and don't need to travel off-site much.
> sporting equipment and facilities
Completely useless to a lot of people. I used the swimming pool in college exactly once, during the swimming class/test. I certainly didn't use the sports fields. I used the bowling alleys, but those were paid-to-use and not covered by the sports fee we had to pay.
> library
I certainly got a lot of benefit out of this. However, with the internet nowadays, I'm not sure I would if I was in school.
The point being, for many school services, everyone pays for them while only some people get a benefit. The scale of "some people" that benefit varies, but the concept doesn't.
Better air quality, lower carbon-cost of transport benefit you even if you don't use it. Similarly for sporting facilities in a state with any sponsoring of medical needs (I'm in UK).
For me Library was a primary place to work (prepaid heat and light!), and access books that couldn't be used online or cost too much to have a private copy (or for which it was more economic not to get one, like you only needed it for a day/week) - but that was a while back. I can't really see even the majority of course books being online though, maybe I'm wrong?
The good thing about charging is that is discourages use of a finite resource, and encourages the use of cheaper and more environmentally friendly options like car pooling, public transit, etc... If you make something free people soak it up.
That said I'm not sure how much those nudges matter when people need to get to class, and they might already have a schedule too busy to coordinate car pooling, and maybe their town or city doesn't have very good public transit. All of those things applied to me when I was going to college. I just parked in the closest residential neighborhood, which should probably be seen as a negative side effect of charging students for parking on campus.
It's a slippery slope when discussing subsidizing. Should students who are Lit majors subsidize expensive research labs? Or sports teams? College costs really can't be a la carte.
Well, you have to draw the line somewhere. Do we pay for all food students eat? The clothes they wear? The houses they live in? The cars they drive?
Obviously not... some schools might provide some of those things, but all schools will draw the line somewhere (I don't know of any schools that provide clothing)
Why is it anymore of a slippery slope to say "the college won't subsidize student parking" than "the college won't subsidize student clothing"?
No, it isn't. The literature department is a fundamental component of the university. Providing land and infrastructure for students to store their property in the middle of campus is not - especially when campus is accessible through a variety of modes of transit. Sure, if the university is in a cornfield in Iowa then parking costs are less of an issue given the low cost of land but the majority of campuses I have been to are limited in land. The university has to make a choice between using that land to educate people or for letting people store their cars.
Honestly, I think students should pay different amounts based on the infrastructure they need for their degree. New students pay some flat amount, and once they declare a major, they pay whatever that major costs. A lit major won't require much infrastructure, so they should pay less than an engineering student that needs access to more expensive equipment, but they'll also likely get a lower salary after college. Students should likewise be presented with estimated salaries upon graduation, as well as estimated cost of their education (including books and whatnot).
Colleges that are more prestigious in a given field should be able to command a higher tuition, which helps pay for faculty, buildings, and equipment. But the higher rate needs to be justified by the school on their estimated costs and future earnings reports. Banks could take all of this into account when deciding whether to grant a loan to a student.
And yes, the school shouldn't be forcing students to pay for athletics, theatre, etc. Athletics often pay for themselves through advertising agreements and merch, so I don't see why anything should be taken from tuition for that (and I don't think it is most of the time).
So yes, education expenses should be ala carte as much as possible, and I think this (and ending federally backed student loans) would result in drastically reduced tuition prices on average as students see what value they're really getting.
The school should pay for it out of their capital funds from their endowment. A lot of Midwestern schools have literally no public transportation so if you want to go anywhere you need a car. Stop looking at basic services as cash flow generators.
Also, schools frequently are in charge of public transportation in the form of shuttles, buses, safe rides, etc.
Regarding subsidies, yes everyone should pay because it's a community and that's how communities maintain large collections of shared infrastructure equitably. Spreading the costs over a large group keeps them down for the individual users. Also, you can extend that logic infinitely. Why did I have to pay for football fields I never got to play on? Why did I have to pay for performing arts theaters I never used? Why did I have to pay for community facilities that weren't targeted towards my race or religion? Why did I have to pay for expensive research labs in departments other than mine? If you abandon the community model then everyone ends up getting slammed with highly variable usury taxes that they may not be able to pay.
A spot in a multistory parking desk costs upwards of $30,000 per spot. Even if you oversell permits by 2x and assume a 50-year lifespan with no maintenance, that is still $300/yr per parking permit. Why should students who want the exclusive right to leave their property on campus be subsidized by students who take more space/environmentally efficients modes of getting to campus?
>>A spot in a multistory parking desk costs upwards of $30,000 per spot
>for a new parking structure is $21,500 per
That only leaves 8500 to cover land charges, maintenance, and any other costs involved (fitting barriers, terminals, paying for electric) to come in at $30k, so perhaps the cost of pricing a place isn't "much lower".
I get where you're coming from and I agree that people should pay what they owe, but just to split hairs...
Paying for parking isn't a "fair" way to distribute it. What is meant to happen is that paying for it funds the creation of more parking (ground level parks are converted to multistories etc). So paying is a necessary evil to create and maintain enough of something to go around.
With a monopoly supplier, like here, that doesn't happen as they can just pocket the cash. They may actually cut the supply as charging 20% fewer people twice the price is more money for them.
At my school, they did many of these things. In fact, it was generally accepted that you shouldn't drive to school, and they made many alternatives.
For the small amount of parking they did provide, they charged a fee for. I think that is a reasonable way of dealing with the limited resource. Make it so you dont need it as much as possible, charge some to the people who decide to use it anyway.
Maybe instead of hiring more administrators or building a luxury dorm, the university could build a parking garage.
It's not like the number of students who need to park is unknown.
If you know there's 1000 students who need to park and only 500 parking spots for them, randomly charging half of them exorbitant fines does not seem like a good solution.
"Number if students who need to park" is not a fixed number. Some of the students parking might have alternative ways to get to school, but will choose to drive if parking is free. Others might have no good alternatives and need to drive.
How do we encourage the people who can walk or ride a bike to school to do that instead of drive? By charging for parking.
Also, not sure where you get the "charge half of them at random a large fine" bit from... they are fining people who park without buying a permit, not randomly.
Parking fees at my university are only in small part due to rationing. You can see this because they recently added fees for the weekend, when they is no need to ration parking spots. For some reason, some university parking authorities are setup not serve the students and staff, but to make money/be cost neutral. That makes no sense to me.
If if I was trying to solve this problem and actually cared about the students I would do some capacity based pricing.
Almost always free, as you approach parking capacity price increases. You could probably also set up a system to text people who have been there more than X hours that they will start to be charged due to high capacity.
> You could probably also set up a system to text people who have been there more than X hours that they will start to be charged due to high capacity.
Your plan is to have pricing that is not knowable in advance, and assess it against the students retroactively?
I'm not sure it's possible to come up with a worse plan.
I mean, the plan could be to destroy random cars if the parking lot is full, to make space for more. That might be slightly worse than this person's plan.
You can still know a range in advance and you can alert people on their phone before charging them - I'd much prefer this to having to pay all the time even when capacity is low.
The problem is that people need to know in advance to change their behavior: tell them that today will cost $20 and people will take the campus shuttle, bike, or walk. Tell them that you’re charging more after they got there just makes it stressful and won’t change behavior unless it happens often enough to be highly predictable - just like many people drive hoping traffic won’t be bad today because they’re prone to dismissing bad events as outliers.
I think this is a fair criticism and if the goal is to change behavior then I agree.
If the goal is to make sure there's always a spot available while having the lowest possible price to guarantee that then I think variable pricing based on capacity is better.
How do you think parking prices are set? They set a price that results in the parking lot mostly full most of the time. They even vary prices by time of day, sometimes.
Also, school parking usage is pretty predictable. Students are parked there while they go to class. Are you expecting them to leave class if parking gets too expensive?
If that's true then they're already doing it and they should have it free sometimes.
I'd suspect that the goal may be generating maximum revenue rather than capacity at lowest price though. If the goal was variable pricing so you get a spot at lowest price (free when possible) then I'd be happy with that.
You could have an upper bound price per lot if you wanted people to know what they might have to pay worst case, but uncapped would be interesting if you want there to always be a spot available.
I live near a Big Ten university that's on an urban campus, so there's a lot of demand for parking in the area. It's a residential college, but with a lot of employees and grad students. So parking is at a premium.
Faculty / staff parking is priced by convenience. The best spots cost the most.
There's a relatively cheap lot at the edge of campus that's served by a shuttle bus. The city bus service is free for employees and students. And the town is relatively bike friendly. I ride my bike to work. One friend of mine keeps a bike on the back of his car and uses it for "last mile" to avoid paying for the expensive parking.
The places where I went to college and graduate school, parking and housing were both cheaper, but land was also cheaper.
> I hate parking fees as much as the next person, and totally appreciate the creativity of the people who defeated this device.
However, how should we handle distributing a limited number of parking spaces when there are more people who want to park than available spaces?
This isn't a parking problem. At its root, this is a personal transportation,public transportation and/or cultural issue. Demand for numerous things are increasingly, but supply is effectively static. That is, for example, parking decks are expensive.
It's probably not possible to solve this as a parking problem But zoom back, dig for the roots and perhaps sone behaviors can be changed, and some cultural progress made?
Well part of making that progress is making the status quo (driving your car to school) slightly more inconvenient by charging to park. That will encourage other modes of transportation.
Not really. Let's imagine students live off campus and commute in each day. If they have lectures at the start of the day, then you'll get a space. But if you have one lecture at 3pm on a given day and don't elect to spend the entire day on campus then you're likely unable to get a parking space.
First come, first served works fine if you all start at the same time but I found you're often at the mercy of timetabling.
Imagine a doctor working at two hospitals who has to move his car from one location to the other mid-day between surgeries. Is it more fair for him to have a worse parking spot and take longer to get to the operating room because he didn't park there earlier? Or should spots be given based on need?
Repeat that but with a cleaner who is struggling to get by with 2 jobs while studying and is providing for kids. It seems much more likely given the location in this story too.
If the parking fees are too low, it’ll just turn into first-come-first-serve.
If you have high fees, you’d be just transferring the scare resource to the rich. And the people who can’t afford it are forced to figure something less convenient out.
It is 'fair' in some senses and not others... it means if you are a student with later classes, you are less likely to get parking.
It also means you can't plan effectively. If half the time, you show up to class and can't park anywhere, how can you make it to class on time consistently?
If your answer is "well, maybe you should take public transportation instead of driving", how is that any better for students than charging for parking?
If you charge for parking, you are at least giving students a choice and the ability to make an informed decision: "is it better to drive and pay $x to park, or save money and take public transportation?"
If you have free parking that is often full, your choice is "take public transportation or have a x% chance of not being able to park and missing class"
I went to a large university located in the middle of nowhere. On any given day, only half of the avaliable spots were filled. A parking pass was $300 a semester IIRC.
When parking isnt a limited resource and students are already paying large amounts of money to attend a rural campus that has poor public transit options what then? For me at the time it really just enforced the idea that college is more of a bussiness then it is actually concerned with education
Why is the University allowed to accept tuition from more students than it has parking spaces? How would a student unable to park be able to attend classes? I can see using parking fees to allocate more desirable parking spaces, but effectively preventing tuition paying students from being able to attend classes is not acceptable (my opinion).
> How would a student unable to park be able to attend classes?
Except in the (very significant, and needs to be considered) case of disability... By walking between close-together classes, and bicycling or taking buses whenever longer distances need to be covered?
This just sounds so alien to me... If I can't bring my gigantic metal box and engine with me, how am I supposed to get places?
These are the sort of topics where the US-ness of HN really shines through. Though it’s true that if the alternatives to driving require infrastructure that does not exist in many places then they’re not really short-term solutions.
The vast majority of universities are accessible by more than just cars, such as buses/shuttles, biking, and walking. If all else fails, you can organise your own shuttle service through carpooling.
I don't see why students who don't use parking should subsidise those that do. Driving is a preference and is absolutely not mandatory, so it should be paid for separately.
> how should we handle distributing a limited number of parking spaces when there are more people who want to park than available spaces?
Presumably most students are living on or not too far from campus. What should be done to get more of them to use transportation options that don't involve driving to and parking on campus?
> Members of the University in statu pupillari who are in residence in term or in the Long Vacation period of residence are required to have a University Motor Licence if they wish to keep motor vehicles (other than mopeds) within 10 miles of Great St Mary's Church.
Unless the university owns all land within 10 miles of Great St Mary's Church Cambridge University has it horribly wrong.
It could be like the school my wife graduated from. You had to pay for a parking pass, but the pass didn't guarantee a spot. You were basically paying for the privilege of showing up an hour early to try and get a parking spot. It was a couple hundred dollars a year as well.
Universities are incentivized to build buildings and destroy parking areas, because buildings make money and parking lots don't. Thus most universities are parking-constrained. The solution is to change that incentive structure, not to ration ever-dwindling parking spaces.
A university incentivized to educate students and do research will do the same because buildings are more suitable for these purposes than parking lots.
I think it's about the demographics. College students are cash-poor but time-rich, so they are more than willing to come in early and circle around to find a spot if it means they don't have to pay. College students are generally more liberal, so the capitalistic way of selling resource to the highest bidder naturally attracts resentment.
If the community collectively believe paying-with-time is the best way to allocate resources, charging parking fee is nothing more than money-grabbing.
My old uni sold the rights to operate their garages for the next 50 years to campus park to build a couple dorms. Prices basically doubled across all tiers when the garages were privatized
I hate parking fees as much as the next person, and totally appreciate the creativity of the people who defeated this device.
However, how should we handle distributing a limited number of parking spaces when there are more people who want to park than available spaces?
If we just say "free to park anywhere!", then there is a good chance you come to school and can't park anywhere (especially if you are not there super early)
You could do a lottery, I guess, but then people who don't need parking might enter the lottery and then sell their spot... making parking even more expensive.
Parking fees seem like a fair way to distribute the limited resource.