Exactly how bad is parking on some college campuses? This bad:
- After Andre Geim shared the Nobel Prize in Physics last year, administrators at the University of Manchester, in England, asked what would entice him to stay. A parking space near his building was Mr. Geim’s sole request. He got it.
- At Minnesota’s Normandale Community College, students are known to arrive at 6 a.m. to get parking and then study in their cars for two hours before class. Others idle outside classroom buildings during the winter and give rides to people in exchange for their parking spaces.
- Dan Middlemiss, a political-science professor who had taught at Canada’s Dalhousie University for 30 years, abruptly resigned 10 days before classes started this fall after a campus security official told him and hundreds of others who had been waiting for as long as four hours to buy annual parking permits that the day’s allotment had sold out. Ken Burt, vice president for finance and administration, conceded that parking-policy changes he announced a week earlier had resulted in a “panic situation,” spurring a run on permits.
With just 2,000 spaces to serve 20,000 students and employees, Dalhousie, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, may have the most nightmarish campus parking in North America. But it is not the only campus where frustrated motorists describe their experiences like something from Kafka. Call it auto-neuroticism.
As colleges have added students and staff, access to affordable, convenient parking has not kept pace. Indeed, many institutions have even reduced the number of spaces, trying to exert a gentle but firm pressure on students and employees to abandon their cars and seek out alternatives like municipal transit, bicycles, and van pools.
Over the years, says Chris Conklin, a consultant with the transportation-planning and design company Vanasse Hangen Brustlin Inc., campus parking has “gone from a given to a managed resource to a scarce resource.”
Kevin King, an associate principal with the architecture and planning firm Ayers Saint Gross, says that’s happened for many reasons. Budget-conscious governing bodies increasingly expect parking and transit systems to pay their own way. Colleges that have signed the American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment are using “carrot and stick” approaches to reduce automobile traffic. The rise of dual-income families means that more academics live too far from where they teach to cycle or walk to work. Meanwhile, more students have their own cars and expect to be able to park them.
Mary Lou Rylands-Isaacson is old enough to remember the days of free and ample close-in parking at the University of Connecticut, where she taught cello for many years. But as the decades passed, parking evolved into a daily struggle that gradually wore her down, nudging her into early retirement in 2003, at the age of 62.
“It just became an impossible life,” she says, describing a routine of arriving by 7:30 a.m. to ensure that she could find nearby parking and not leaving until after 11 most nights because of evening recitals and instrument lessons.
Distant lots served by shuttle buses weren’t much help, she says, because she had to commute with her cello, which the drivers insisted she not bring on board because it blocked the aisle. So the 135-pound professor often had to lug her instrument across the campus. Part-timers suffered even more, she says, with their fragmented schedules forcing them to play a game of musical chairs for parking at UConn and the other campuses where they taught.
For a time during the 1990s, while her elderly mother lived with her, Ms. Rylands-Isaacson would borrow her “handicap” hangtag and park illegally. “Sometimes I would feel guilty and sort of limp when I walked out of handicap-parking spaces,” she confides. “Then the university caught onto this. Everybody was using their grandmothers’ handicap-parking stickers.”
As UConn’s men’s and women’s basketball teams became powerhouses, their fans filled campus parking garages, she adds, leaving would-be fine-arts concertgoers with no place to park. “It became an awful thing because the public couldn’t get to us.” Whether intentionally or not, her university had “created a bitter, disgruntled, hostile environment.”
Some campus employees see access to nearby, economical parking—or the lack of it—as a measure of their college’s regard for them.
That’s why Heather Johnson left a tenure-track position at Western Kentucky University in the spring for another as a biology instructor at Northwest-Shoals Community College, in her native Alabama. Convenient access to parking, while not her only reason for moving, played a big part in her decision.
“I feel more of the friendliness and respect at this institution than I did before,” says Ms. Johnson. “There are many ways that that manifests itself, but parking is one of them.”
Mr. King, of Ayers Saint Gross, says colleges that disregard employees’ sensitivity to such issues do so at their own peril. “In some instances where the faculty is unionized, parking is usually the final sticking point on getting the contract approved.”
When parking demand exceeds supply, colleges routinely oversell the number of permits relative to the number of spaces, reasoning that not every permit holder shows up to park every day or stays parked the full day. That’s what chafed Mr. Middlemiss, late of Dalhousie, which had been overselling its permits by as much as 65 percent. The professor, who did not return calls from The Chronicle, told Canadian reporters that the dearth of parking had forced him to arrive at campus by 7 a.m. for his 2:30 p.m. class to be assured of a space.
That scenario sounds all too familiar to Jane E. Schultz, a professor of English at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, who was rejected for a campus parking permit because of four outstanding tickets she had accumulated over about eight years. Once she had parked in a nearly empty lot on a Friday night while she was showing a film to her students. Another time she says, she had prepared the food for an event honoring two retiring colleagues, and her meter was expired for about 10 minutes.
She still owes the parking office $100, plus any late fees. “They hounded me,” says Ms. Schultz, who directs the university’s literature program. “They sent a collection agency after me. They phoned me. And I said: ‘Look, I’m not going to pay these tickets. I’m a faculty member, I’ve written several books, I’ve already done this for many, many years where I was in the IUPUI parking system, having not enough parking spaces for the people who needed to park there.’”
She also objects that some faculty-staff lots on the urban commuter campus include spaces for students as well. “I don’t believe that students and faculty are equal, in the sense that, if students aren’t there, class continues. If faculty aren’t, there’s no class.”
Steve Fox, an associate professor of English and director of IUPUI’s writing program, points out that faculty and staff members with permits can also park in student spaces but that the reverse is not true.
Nonetheless, he says, the parking service’s aggressive ticketing and towing policies have caused bad blood with faculty members. “It all depends on whether you want to let the market reign or whether you think faculty deserve to be able to park where they work,” he says.
Carol M. Bresnahan has seen the full range of parking situations during a career that has taken her to four institutions, including her new post as provost at Rollins College. Even where parking was abundant, she says, people have complained.
Managing expectations is the key to keeping employees happy, she says. “I’ve never seen a campus where people want to walk half a mile. People want to park within a 50-yard walk of where their office is.”
She herself bikes to work, except on the days when she needs to haul materials to campus. So far her only impediment has been Florida’s near-daily afternoon rain. “If you can plan around that, it’s a great alternative to driving,” she says. “You just find a bike rack and lock your bike, and then you can park really close to your office.”
Leah Shopkow doesn’t have enough faith in the “young and inexperienced drivers” of Bloomington, Ind., to risk cycling to work at Indiana University, where she is an associate professor of medieval history. Instead she walks a mile and a half almost every day, rain or shine, sleet or snow.
“My blood pressure’s 105 over 70,” she says. “I’m 56 years old.”
Years ago Ms. Shopkow and her husband bought “on the wrong side of the tracks” so they could afford the size house they wanted for themselves and their two daughters—a common story in many college towns, where homes adjacent to the campus are out of reach for most academics. She still buys a parking pass every year, about $280 a pop, for the few times she needs to haul more goods to campus than she can carry in her backpack.
At Ithaca College, in upstate New York, parking is little challenge for Thomas R. Rochon. He is president of the college, and like many campus CEO’s, he has a designated parking space, with his name on it, about three minutes’ walk from his office. Although he has never sensed any resentment, he is aware that some people might think “unkind thoughts” as they walk past and see his official vehicle, a 2001 Chevy Impala, parked there.
Last year Mr. Rochon decided to give up his spot for one week to a lucky faculty member as the grand prize in a drawing for door prizes at his annual holiday party. He selected the first week of February, among winter’s most bone-chilling seven days. He described the experience later on his blog, from the initial shock of seeing an unfamiliar car in his personal space to finally figuring out the most sensible route to the administration building from the employee lot in which he had to park that week. The lot was only three minutes farther away, but Mr. Rochon realized that proximity wasn’t the biggest advantage of having his own space.
“The main difference is that I know where I’m going to park as I pull into the lot,” he says. “So psychologically I can be mulling some problem, because I’m just on autopilot.”
Sally Grans-Korsh, director of facilities planning and programming for the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system, says she hears parking complaints on campuses where faculty and staff members pay as little as $40 a month. She is not especially sympathetic.
“Come on,” she says. “We’re in Minnesota. You’re lucky to have a job.”
