Why Parking Drives Us Mad

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In this episode

Buckle up, and get ready to lay on your horn. We’re taking a drive through the enraging, labyrinthine, and often misunderstood world of college-campus parking. Along the way, we’ll meet a college instructor who complained about parking fees, only to pay more than he’d ever imagined; a parking administrator who promises she’s not evil; and a writer who may have unmasked the real villain in higher ed’s tortured parking story.

Related Reading:

• A History Instructor Complained About Parking Fees. It Cost Him His Job.
• He lost His Job After Complaining About Parking. Now He’s Been Reinstated.
• Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

Guests:

• Nell Gluckman, senior reporter at The Chronicle of Higher Education
• Adrienne Tucker, director of parking and transportation at Kansas State University
• Henry Grabar, staff writer at Slate and author

Transcript

This transcript was produced using a speech recognition software. It was reviewed by production staff, but may contain errors. Please email us at collegematters@chronicle.com if you have any questions.

Jack Stripling This is College Matters from The Chronicle.

Henry Grabar Many people find themselves in this situation at universities where they feel like for them, parking, free parking, convenient parking is tantamount to access. And if they can’t have it, then it feels like they’re actually being prevented from doing their job.

Jack Stripling There’s nothing quite like scoring a sweet parking spot. Circling a crowded lot, only to happen upon a vacant curbside space, is one of life’s great pleasures — a quiet victory in a world that can seem designed to beat us down.

But for students and employees on a lot of college campuses, parking is more often than not a source of frustration. For the car-addicted, there’s never enough parking. For the sustainability-minded, there’s far too much. Either way, parking has long been a third rail of campus politics. The late Clark Kerr, who led the University of California System in the fifties and sixties, once described the modern university as “a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking.” The job of a college president may have changed since Kerr’s day, but anger over campus parking has not. Today on the show, we’ll take a proverbial drive through the greater college campus parking landscape. From the hot blacktops of Texas, to the snow-covered lots of Kansas, to the quirky confines of Berkeley, California — where you really have to be a genius to get a great parking spot — we’re going on a journey to learn why campus parking drives everyone mad.

To start, we’ll drop in on my colleague, Nell Gluckman, a senior reporter at The Chronicle of Higher Education, who recently wrote about a very testy campus parking debate.

Jack Stripling Hey, Nell, welcome to College Matters.

Nell Gluckman: Thank you, Jack. It’s good to be here.

Jack Stripling: What’s your relationship to parking?

Nell Gluckman I’m not a big driver. I’ve lived most of my life in cities. I mean, I’ve certainly been in the position where you’re just trying to get somewhere in your car likely for your job and you have this big hulking piece of machinery that is with you and you just need to park it somewhere. And it can be very frustrating. So I’m empathetic to people who are passionate about it.

Jack Stripling Yeah, I mean we both have worked in DC, which is a tough parking town, I feel like it’s fair to say. And then college towns are interesting. I live in one now, and parking in college towns can be tough, particularly around the university. And you wrote a story recently about a parking dispute that I wanted to ask you about. How did you get on to this story?

Nell Gluckman Started with a tip at Tarleton State University in Stephenville, Texas and as a lot of these kinds of stories often start, it’s an email. I followed up in this case with Ted Roberts, a faculty member in the history department there who had complained about parking at a meeting and then a few weeks later found himself out of a job.

Jack Stripling Oh my.

Nell Gluckman Yeah. Tried to get as much email and audio documentation of it as existed and in this case there was actually quite a bit of that so...

Jack Stripling So this seemed like a kind of contained story in some way: guy complains about parking, guy loses his job. Tell me about Ted Roberts, though. What’s his story? What’s this guy’s background?

Nell Gluckman Ted Roberts had gone to Tarleton State University, got his master’s degree there as well. He was also a veteran. He had served in the Iraq War. And after coming back from that, he got a job as a history instructor at Tarleton. He had been, until last spring an instructor there for 12 years. He was not on the tenure track however. He had a one-year contract that was renewed every year. He taught five history courses, I think, including a very popular military history class, and served as something of a mentor as I understand it for a lot of the ROTC students at Tarleton State University.

Jack Stripling And Tarleton for folks who don’t know, I think they have about 18,000 students. This is a university that’s about a hundred miles southwest of Dallas. I was looking at it yesterday. So Roberts at some point gets worked up about changes to parking. What was he upset about?

Nell Gluckman So Roberts was worked up because his parking fee went up from a $105 to $400 a year. This wasn’t his only concern about parking, but it was his main concern. He wasn’t satisfied with some of the initial response he got, but in the spring of 2024, heard that there was going to be a listening session with faculty members and the president of the university and he thought that this might be a good place to voice some of these concerns about the pretty steep growth in parking fees.

Jack Stripling And so he goes to this meeting with the college’s president and confronts him with his data about this. What did Roberts show him?

Nell Gluckman Yeah, so he did a little bit of preliminary research. He looked at parking fees at other colleges in Texas and other colleges around the country showing a big range. But also showing that Tarleton’s new parking fee was higher than a lot of other Texas universities’ parking fees. He also looked up the salaries of Tarleton State employees and the president’s salary which was at the time, was $400,000 a year. The point he wanted to make was, you know, this might not seem lik e a big increase but it really is. It’s not a university where faculty and staff make the highest salaries in the country, and he thought that the jump was very steep and especially compared to other colleges that he had looked up.

Jack Stripling I see, well I think we do actually have a clip from the faculty meeting. Let’s hear a little bit of it.

MEETING TAPE Why all of a sudden last year we get hit with a four hundred dollar parking fee. At the very least West Texas A&M. West Texas A&M has implemented a salary based tier system, okay? And I know the Buffalo’s do it out there differently than we do. But couldn’t we at least go to that instead of just getting slammed with a four hundred dollar parking fee?

Jack Stripling So what happens after the meeting? Does the president see the error of his ways and reduce parking fees?

Nell Gluckman No, I don’t think the parking fees have changed. A lot of people left the meeting thinking that would be it. But a little over two weeks later Roberts got an email that his acting dean wanted to meet with him, later that day they met and she told him that his contract would not be renewed the following year. First time in 12 years of working there that he’d heard this. And they talked a little bit about why she didn’t say directly, but she did reference the meeting in which he had complained about these parking fees and the news of that had gotten back to her and the provost and she was explicit that the provost, this was the provost’s decision to not renew his contract, not her decision. But that the behavior had been, I think, intolerable was the word used.

Jack Stripling How do we know what was said in this meeting?

Nell Gluckman So Roberts recorded it and shared the recording with us.

Jack Stripling Let’s hear a little bit of that.

Acting Dean: And so after some consideration of different approaches we could take, the decision was made to non-reappoint.

Ted Roberts: So they’re firing me.

Acting Dean: They’re not reappointing you back to your (inaudible) position. And it’s not, I will say, this is an academic affairs decision. This was working as they comes things through the provost, the decision was made to non-reappoint.

Ted Roberts: Non-reappoint means firing, yeah?

Acting Dean: It means not coming back, right.

Ted Roberts: That’s firing.

Jack Stripling That’s pretty fascinating that Roberts has a recording of this meeting, that he shares it with you. My understanding is that the dean knew she was being taped, too. That’s your understanding?

Nell Gluckman: That’s my understanding, yeah.

Jack Stripling: And what do you make of this conversation?

Nell Gluckman It’s definitely a tense conversation. It’s one of these as a reporter you rarely get to actually hear this kind of exchange between a faculty member and their boss. But you know you can, you can tell that he’s upset; he makes that pretty clear. He kind of is having a hard time believing that he’s now suddenly lost his job. I can’t speak to how she was feeling, but he says at least once: I know you’re the messenger here. I know you’re the messenger. And they come to a sort of cordial understanding…

Jack Stripling: Kind of a détente.

Nell Gluckman: …place by the end of the meeting. and I don’t think he has hard feelings towards her.

Jack Stripling So how did people react after we published this story? What happened?

Nell Gluckman Well for Roberts he got rehired at Tarleton State University, not into the history department position that he had before but into another faculty member position. So he’s teaching again at the university this year. We also heard a lot from readers. I got some emails and saw a lot of comments online on social media about our story. A lot of it was people who saw themselves in Roberts, the faculty member, but also people pointing out that parking is expensive and it should be not subsidized by the university, but it should be a cost. And one reader noted that the construction and maintenance fees for parking are really high, that there should be carpool programs for employees like Roberts, and people should be looking into public transportation and bicycle options if they have a problem paying for parking. So it really ran the gamut, the responses that I saw. It struck different chords for different people.

Jack Stripling Well, it just sounds like people resonated very strongly with it. Why do you think that is?

Nell Gluckman I think it’s because parking is something that we all often have to deal with, but parking is never really just about parking. A lot of the people commenting online noted that Roberts is a non-tenured professor as are many people now teaching at universities, and so the pay discrepancy and power imbalance between top administrator like the president and a faculty member like Roberts is pretty extreme. There are environmental and sustainability concerns. Roberts himself was very struck and passionate about the salary discrepancies between administrators and staff and faculty members. So it really touched on a lot of issues that percolate often on college campuses. Certainly there was also frustration over the simple idea that you have to pay to come to work and do your job. When you have stagnant salaries as a lot of universities have in the last several years, a parking increase really amounts to, or feels like, a salary cut.

Jack Stripling Well, Nell thanks so much for telling us this story. I really appreciate it. I’m not surprised that there was a big response to it because everybody has dealt with this, so thanks for sharing your story with us.

Nell Gluckman Thanks for having me.

Jack Stripling As Nell’s reporting illustrates, a parking dispute can often feel like a David and Goliath story. On one side, there’s the big, bad administration, hiking up fees and handing out citations. And on the other, you have lowly students or adjunct professors, who are barely getting by and paying through the nose for the privilege of parking near a campus building. But I wondered what Goliath might have to say about all of this. So I emailed the giant, and asked to meet up for a video chat. To my shock, Goliath agreed. And she was nothing like the monster I’d envisioned.

Adrienne Tucker So my name is Adrienne Tucker. I’m the director of parking and transportation at Kansas State University.

Jack Stripling Well Adrienne, you were kind enough to meet with me. But as head of parking at a university, are you a loathed person in your community?

Adrienne Tucker Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Oh, I have no delusions about that. I mean, I’m working hard. I started here in September of 2024. Previously, a couple of years ago, I was the assistant director of parking here. I’m working really hard to try to change the narrative that we are the money hungry Nazis out there, that all we care about is money. You know, we’ve implemented some great programs that are a benefit to the community. And so slowly over time, I think we can get there. We’re never going to — people are nicer to us now in the office and on the phone, but they’ll still bash us on social media. I mean, and that’s fine.

Jack Stripling You have a thick skin about that?

Adrienne Tucker Oh, absolutely. You have to have a thick skin in this industry. I’ve been screamed at, cursed at, threatened. It’s just people just think that they have free reign to just treat you like garbage.

Jack Stripling You have tire tracks on your back.

Adrienne Tucker Yeah, you really do.

Jack Stripling Metaphorical and real.

Adrienne Tucker Yeah. And you know, and what I try to instill in everyone that works here in this department is A, don’t take it personally. B, like most other situations, it’s probably not even about you. They’re probably already having a bad day. And this is just the icing on the cake. And so it’s just bringing them down a couple notches. And I told everybody, it’s like, have the philosophy of, find a way to say yes. Just because they got a parking citation doesn’t mean that we can’t reduce it or change it to a warning. Find a way to say yes.

Jack Stripling So you should complain about a parking ticket? Is this what you’re telling me, Adrienne?

Adrienne Tucker Yeah, absolutely.

Jack Stripling So what’s something most people don’t understand about campus parking that you wish they did?

Adrienne Tucker We do not take money from the university to operate. So we do not get money from student fees, tuition or anything else that the student gives the university. We are entirely self-funded, 100 percent. So their parking permit, the fees that they pay for their parking permit, go towards lot maintenance. And you’re looking at anywhere from eight to thirteen thousand dollars per stall just to do a mill and overlay in a parking lot. You’re looking at a couple hundred grand in garage maintenance every year. We just had a snow event where we had 20 inches of snow. Just to plow all of that snow and to hire contractors to help us, because we don’t have enough equipment, we spent over one hundred thousand dollars just to remove snow from one snow storm. That’s how expensive it is to maintain parking. So if you want nice parking lots that aren’t full of potholes, that are well painted, that are well lit, that have good signage, you have to pay for it.

Jack Stripling But is it a revenue generator for the university? Or are you saying no?

Adrienne Tucker No. No, the university doesn’t take our money per se. So, for example, I have a bond on, my office here is in a garage. I have a bond on the garage, so I have a bond payment I have to make every year. And it’s about $1.1 to $1.2 million every year. The university requires me to have on hand $1.5 million in the bank to help cover the bond payment and any other maintenance or any other concerns that happen if I were to suddenly find myself without revenue, like we did during COVID-19, and the university shut down. So take that right off the bat. I might have two million dollars extra from permit sales, but then I, right now, I have to rebuild parking lots. I have to rebuild roads. I have to put in new curbs. I need updated lighting in my parking lots. I need to put a new camera system in my garage.

Jack Stripling So is nobody getting rich off parking at Kansas State?

Adrienne Tucker No, no. Not even a little.

Jack Stripling See, we are myth busting. We are actively myth busting.

Adrienne Tucker We are. And I would be hard pressed to find a university that is just sitting on coffers of millions of dollars. I dare you to try to find one

Jack Stripling Do you have a philosophical opposition to handing parking over to a private company?

Adrienne Tucker In the university space, yes. Because their goal is to make money. So the rates they charge are in no interest to the student or the faculty and staff that have to come to work every day. But no, it’s not something that’s very common. I haven’t seen a trend or an uptick in the amount of universities headed that direction. I’m opposed to it personally. I don’t think that it’s in the best interest of the actual users of that parking because, again, they’re there to make money. I’m here to cover expenses and to be able to provide goods and services to the campus community, not make millions of dollars.

Jack Stripling So are you part of a generation of more humble and benevolent parking administrators? Is that what you’re telling me?

Adrienne Tucker We will never be considered as benevolent. It’ll never happen. I have no delusions of grandeur. But what I personally have tried to do is change that narrative, that we’re not the grumpy old trolls that live under the bridge. You know, we have a value to add to your experience at the university.

And I think that I feel lucky in that when I started in the parking industry, I started in valet. Going from hospitals to hotels, you’re taught that parking is the first and last impression of the business, which is very true. The same is true for the university as well. You are the first impression, whether you are a stakeholder, a founder, somebody who is a donor, a potential student, their parents. You’re coming for an athletic event or any event on campus. Parking’s your first impression of that university. We need to start treating it as such.

Jack Stripling I’m curious. When you enter a parking lot, what are you thinking? What do you do? I’m picturing you as Jason Bourne in this situation. You’re finding spaces in ways that mere mortals like me cannot. Do you think you’re better at finding a good parking spot than the average person?

Adrienne Tucker No, no. Finding the actual spot, that’s just luck. There’s no skill at that at all.

Jack Stripling How do you feel when you score like a really sweet parking spot?

Adrienne Tucker Lucky.

Jack Stripling Like a rock star space?

Adrienne Tucker Oh, absolutely lucky. I’m like the parking gods are smiling on me today.

Jack Stripling Okay, so that doesn’t, even working in the industry, that just never gets old.

Adrienne Tucker No, it does not. Absolutely not.

Jack Stripling I’m glad that we had a chance to talk to you about this. I think you’ve humanized the whole industry, you know.

Adrienne Tucker I’m trying. As I said, I think definitely in the university space, we need to take a customer service approach first above anything else. So I’m going to try and get us there.

Jack Stripling All right. Well, good luck with that. Happy parking. I appreciate it.

Adrienne Tucker Thank You.

Jack Stripling After I talked with Adrienne, I started to question everything I’d thought about campus parking. She said universities weren’t making big bucks on parking. And she didn’t sound like Goliath, or a troll living under a bridge. She was actually very nice. But I still felt like we were missing the answer to the bigger question: Why does campus parking make everyone so angry? Why does it seem like no one is happy with it, no matter what people like Adrienne do? Luckily for me, there’s a guy who wrote a whole book all about parking. More after the break.

BREAK

Jack Stripling Henry Grabar is a staff writer for Slate and a genuine expert on parking. Henry, welcome to the show.

Henry Grabar Thanks for having me.

Jack Stripling Henry, I’ve been talking with people about parking on college campuses. And there’s a common theme: Parking tends to tick people off. As someone who has thought a lot about parking, why is it such a maddening issue?

Henry Grabar Well, we’ve built a society here in America in particular, in which every trip begins and ends with a parking spot. So you haven’t really gotten anywhere until you’ve found a place to park the car. And so I understand how it can feel, you almost feel trapped when you’re driving around and you can’t find a space to park. And so I certainly understand the irritation, the emotions, the frequent fights that we see over parking spaces, both physical fist fights, but also, you know, fights in community meetings and faculty meetings and that kind of stuff. But I think the other thing to remember about when parking is free is that parking is not free to provide, right? And so the question is whether we make drivers bear the full cost of the expense of providing that parking, including the opportunity cost of what else we could have done with that land. And historically, the answer has been no, because no one’s ever willing to actually pay full freight for parking. But recently, there’s been a movement towards, you know what, if people aren’t willing to pay for what it costs us to build this garage, then maybe we shouldn’t build this garage at all. Maybe it’s cheaper – and I think many universities have found this – maybe it’s actually cheaper to hire bus drivers and bus people in from the nearby subway stop.

Jack Stripling So I want to talk to you specifically about campus parking issues. But let’s start with the bigger picture. You published a book in 2023 called Paved Paradise, How Parking Explains the World. Let’s dig into that subtitle. How does parking explain the world?

Henry Grabar Well, the title of the book came out of the reporting that I did to get the idea. And so I am a journalist and I write about city issues. And so I found myself writing about transportation, housing, climate change, infrastructure, municipal finance. Turned out that all of these topics, each one of them was intimately entwined with the question of parking. And so I began to feel like, as the late, great Donald Shoup would say: whatever the question, the answer is parking.

Jack Stripling So Donald Shoup, for folks who don’t know, introduce us.

Henry Grabar Well, Donald Shoup is sort of the godfather of American parking studies. He was a professor at UCLA, and he wrote a celebrated 2005 book called The High Cost of Free Parking, in which he argued that basically the whole American parking system was all messed up, in part because parking was too cheap. And so he sort of created this field of people who study parking. And so the minute that I began working on the book and sort of trying to dig into how parking affected each one of these different issues within the city, he was a terrific source for me, as were his many students and followers.

Jack Stripling So even though the book isn’t specifically about higher education, one of the seminal figures in this story is a professor, right?

Henry Grabar Yeah, that’s right. And I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I mean, in addition to living in Los Angeles, which I think was a tremendous influence in his thinking about car culture, he did have the experience of engaging in the life of the university. And I think in many ways, a university is a microcosm of a city, not just intellectually and in other ways, but also in terms of how people get to work and thinking about how to manage these resources, manage the way that people come and how you negotiate, basically, the demand for parking on the part, in many cases, of faculty and other employees, with the constraints, the spatial and financial constraints that govern the provision of parking. And balancing those two things is a major headache for university administrators, as it is for big city mayors.

Jack Stripling And one of Shoup’s big theories, as you alluded to, is that parking might be too cheap. I think a lot of people who have paid for parking might disagree. Unpack that for us.

Henry Grabar Yeah. So one of the big arguments that he makes in the book is that if you’re in a place where parking is in high demand and that parking is underpriced, then one of the results of that is going to be that all the parking spaces are taken and people show up and they drive in circles looking for parking spaces. And so you get lots of irritation, lots of traffic, lots of additional miles on the road, additional air pollution, other externalities of car use, because you haven’t properly priced the parking to create spaces for people who need them. And so one of the kind of miracles of the parking meter, actually, is that it enables you to sort this precious resource, which is the curb, right? The interface between the street and businesses or houses or what have you enables you to sort the curb by how much people are willing to pay for parking. And so while some people might end up paying more, the savings come in the form of time, which is not insignificant.

Jack Stripling I think some of the disputes that we’ve reported on, including one that I discussed with Nell Gluckman, my colleague, about a parking dispute in Texas, are a product of two things that are particular to higher education. One is people think they’re going to this parking space for a good reason. They’re either going to dispense knowledge or receive knowledge. And so maybe that feels a little differently than going to a shopping mall. The other thing is, is that there’s a vast array of different compensation levels. You’re going from students who are actually probably incurring debt to be on this campus to faculty members who, you know, depending on your status within the faculty, are being compensated at different levels. You had an experience that you talk about in your book related to your cousin, who was at the University of California at San Diego. Talk to me about her experience, how that might fit into this larger picture of the different constituencies that parking serves on college campuses.

Henry Grabar Yeah. So my cousin was a researcher, a scientific researcher at the University of California, San Diego. Like many UC campuses, like many campuses nationwide, there isn’t enough parking for everybody who wants it. And so the parking is allocated and distributed based on this kind of fine-toothed hierarchy of ranking systems. Basically, she had a sort of a minute change in her job title, which resulted in her parking pass getting downgraded. And she suddenly had no way of actually getting to her lab, which as a scientist, she needed to go to sometimes late at night, early in the morning to check in. And she was unable to actually park near the laboratory. And I think many people find themselves in this situation at universities where they feel like for them, parking, free parking, convenient parking is tantamount to access. And if they can’t have it, then it feels like they’re actually being prevented from doing their job. And I think that’s certainly the way that she felt about the situation. One of the things that I encourage people to think about in the book is the idea that one other flip side of that access question is, why can’t I live in a place where I would be able to get to work without driving, right? And it turns out that the answer to that question is also parking. And so I think, you know, you can say like, I need to have free parking at my job because I have no other way of getting there. The more important question we should be asking as a society is why can’t we build more housing near jobs so that people could walk, take transit, bike to work? And that is a crisis that I think exists far beyond universities, right? We have failed to keep up with housing demand. And so parking and having a parking spot begins to feel like the only way people can have access to their city, to their job, to their classroom and so on.

Jack Stripling Now, your book notes that Berkeley has an interesting reward system when it comes to parking. Tell me about that.

Henry Grabar Yeah, so at the University of California, Berkeley, you have to win a Nobel Prize to get a reserved parking spot right at the center of campus. And I think, yeah, perhaps that’s like the ultimate high bar in terms of the hierarchy system being doled out, but it’s funny. But it also reflects a fundamental truth about a university in a high cost area that’s like pretty well served by transit and with a pretty dense housing stock around it, which is that there is an enormous opportunity cost to trying to provide that free parking. And not only does providing that free parking operate as a subsidy for driving, right? In a way that disadvantages people who choose to walk or bike because they don’t get any of that subsidy for themselves. But it also actually makes it harder for people to get to campus in any other way. And I think this is something… we all have this kind of intuitive experience actually of being in a place where parking is ample, but it’s hard to walk or use transit or bike. And that’s because parking just takes up so much space. I mean, it separates every building from the building next to it in a way that ultimately probably cuts the urban density of a place in half. And that can be a huge difference if you’re thinking about the distance that it takes to walk from one edge of campus to another. Parking can really slice up the urban environment in ways that end up encouraging people to drive more and use more parking.

Jack Stripling So do we have this all backwards? I think a lot of people think they need more parking. But when we’ve written about this, we’ve certainly heard from professors, people who are sustainability minded, who are saying, whoa, the problem is not that parking costs too much, it’s that we have so much of it it’s discouraging people from using other modes of transit.

Henry Grabar I mean, the number one determinant of whether people will use transit, bike, walk to work, et cetera, is how much the parking costs. Because driving is almost always faster. Obviously, it’s nice to be in a car when it’s raining or it’s cold outside. And so the question is, how do we weigh the externalities of everybody driving to work, even if each individual person wants that for themselves? Most of us do not want a university where everybody drives because it would, as I said, slice up the campus, incur tremendous costs, impose all these externalities, et cetera. And various universities have come around to the idea that it is actually cheaper to try to encourage all these alternative transportations than it is to provide the parking. And in fact, in many places, it’s cheaper to pay people not to drive than it is to subsidize their parking by building more garages. In fact, there’s this very interesting experiment that’s been underway at MIT, where they changed how they charge for parking. I think that’s something that probably goes understudied. But when you buy parking at a university, you often buy a parking pass for a year, which entitles you to some degree of parking that you can access within the university. And once you’ve bought that parking, you’ve made a down payment on all those trips you’d make all year. And so just that pricing structure results in an enormous incentive to drive. And what MIT did was they started charging by the day instead of by the year. And it turns out if you charge people, even if the amount ends up being the same, averaged out over all those days, if you charge people by the day, you create this incentive for somebody to say, you know what, today I’m in a carpool. Today, it’s nice out. I’ll bike. And every time they do that, they save a little bit of money. And those financial nudges go a long way towards pushing people into these transportation alternatives.

Jack Stripling You know, I want to go back to this idea of a reward system around parking. You mentioned that Berkeley gives nice parking spaces to Nobel Prize winners. Good luck with that. But there was a video recently that went viral of an employee at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, who, after 13 years as an employee there, was allowed to park in a downtown parking space, which was closer to, I guess, where he worked. And it kind of went viral. Let’s listen to a little bit of that and then we can talk about it.

Video Clip Woo! On-site parking! That’s what I — 13 years for this! 13 years for this! Oh Man!

Henry Grabar Well, I think that reflects many people’s, probably many people’s feelings about being upgraded to the prime parking spot at their workplace. Now, you know, this is from the Mayo Clinic, right? It’s not, it’s not a university, but it’s not so far off in the sense that it is an enormous institution that occupies a large land area at the center of a city, has thousands of employees, as well as many visitors, and must weigh these priorities in terms of deciding how to get people to the office. And what’s funny about the Mayo Clinic is they’ve actually built just an absolute ton of parking at the center of Rochester, surrounding all their university buildings. And they still haven’t been able to actually park everybody who wants to drive to work there. And so what they’ve ended up with is sort of the worst of both worlds, where there’s lots of employees who park to satellite parking lots and then take the bus in. And yet the area around the campus still doesn’t have a lot of housing or a lot of walkable urbanism or what have you, because there is so much space dedicated to parking. And by the way, at such a great expense.

Jack Stripling And to the extent there’s anger about parking on college campuses, it is often trained on whoever is that parking director or head administrator. I talked to Adrienne Tucker earlier, who’s the head of parking at Kansas State. She said she’s kind of a loathed figure on campus and is trying to project a more sort of benevolent persona to the campus. You talked to, I think, a parking administrator at Duke who is much vilified, even in the campus newspaper. Why do people hate campus administrators who have something to do with parking?

Henry Grabar I think everybody always hates whoever’s in charge of the parking. I mean, you see that in towns and cities too, like the parking enforcement officers are often the sort of lowest ranked of the civic employees, always getting yelled at or attacked by angry motorists. I think the reality is your everyday drivers just do not have a sense of the tradeoffs that are in play when it comes to providing parking. It just feels like the kind of thing where, because you think parking is worthless — parking lots are like these disused, under-invested, unpleasant spaces — you just think like, there could be enough parking for everybody if they actually wanted to provide it. And so their refusal to do so and their insistence on these hierarchical ranking systems and shuttle buses and TDM and monthly payments and all that stuff feels like, I don’t know, like it’s the university’s environmental policy or they’re trying to do good or something like that. And I think there is some of that, but it’s also just pure management of a resource that is actually very expensive to provide. And so I think many drivers don’t realize that, like they think parking is worthless, but it actually costs, you know, building a garage at a big city university could cost $50,000 a space. And if it’s underground, it could cost twice that much. And so the question is, are your employees willing to pay that amount of money to have a parking space on campus? And I think if they are, then, you know, maybe you build those garages. But even then, there’s the opportunity cost of like what else would have been in that space, right? What is the mission of the university? Is it to provide parking for people or is it to create more classrooms and laboratories and all that?

Jack Stripling It makes it hard to discern who the villain is in this story. If I look back to talking to my colleague, Nell, about what was happening in Texas, that story set up a professor against an administration that thoughtlessly raised parking fees. If I think about my conversation with Adrienne at Kansas State, she’s dealing with people who got a parking ticket and are battling over it and don’t think it’s fair, but they have no concept of how much it costs to offer the parking. And then we hear from readers who are saying it’s actually the fault of the people with the cars in the first place. They ought to get a bike and we wouldn’t have these issues. I’ve given you a chance. Tell me who’s the villain in the parking story. Do you know, Henry?

Henry Grabar Yes, the true villain is our wasteful land use policies, which have forced us into a situation in which it is very, very difficult to live in a place where you’re able to go about the requirements of daily life, whether that’s going to a job or taking your kids to school or going to the doctor or getting to the gym, going to the grocery store, all those things have become very difficult without having a car. And so the median American household now has 2.2 cars. We build more three-car garages than one-bedroom apartments. And as a result, we’ve built ourselves into a place where parking feels like it should be a right, since we’ve all been put in this situation where it’s hard to get anywhere without driving. But the reality is that it still just doesn’t work at a certain density level, like a big city downtown or a university. You just cannot provide enough parking to accommodate everybody who wants it without destroying the place that everybody’s trying to drive to in the first place. And we’ve all seen examples of places where they have provided enough parking for the maximum amount of users at the peak time. And what that looks like is a giant mall on the edge of town. So that’s what you want. If you are asking for limitless free parking, then that is the only model of land use that will satisfy you. And I think there’s another way to go, right? Which is instead of asking, can I have more parking? It’s to ask, can I have better access, right? And then if you start with that as the question and you think, how could we answer this question about access rather than parking, I think what it leads you to ultimately is revisiting the way we’ve designed our cities and making sure we can put more housing closer to jobs and make it possible for more people to live without cars if they choose. And that, by the way, has an advantage for those of us who do live with cars, because the more discretionary trips we take off the road, the more space on the road there is for me.

Jack Stripling Well, this sounds like a very complex, multi-pronged problem that only a group of very smart people who got together in one place and had advanced degrees could solve if given enough time and if they could get to their office.

Henry Grabar Yeah, I mean, you know, I totally agree with you, Jack. And what’s funny is up until Donald Shoup published The High Cost of Free Parking, there were very few people, in fact, in the urban planning field who were actually studying this issue and finding ways to solve the parking problem. And I’m happy to say that in the last 20 years, that has really changed. There’s a lot of people thinking about how to ameliorate this situation without making faculty members very angry.

Jack Stripling Well, thank you so much for coming and discussing this with us. I highly recommend your book, Paved Paradise. It’s a great read, whether you think you’re interested in parking or not. It’s really a story about us and the world. So thanks for discussing this with us.

Henry Grabar Thanks for having me, Jack.

Jack Stripling Not long after my conversation with Henry, we learned that Donald Shoup, the urban planning scholar who wrote a landmark book on parking, had died at the age of 86. Dr. Shoup was a distinguished professor emeritus of urban planning at UCLA. In its obituary of Shoup, The New York Times described how the professor had wryly reminded conference audiences that parking is central to all of human existence. “Many of us,” Shoup said, “were probably even conceived in a parked car.”

Jack Stripling College Matters from The Chronicle is a production of The Chronicle of Higher Education, the nation’s leading independent newsroom covering colleges. If you like the show, please leave us a review or invite a friend to listen. And remember to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss an episode. You can find an archive of every episode, all of our show notes, and much more at chronicle.com/collegematters. If you like, drop us a note at collegematters@chronicle.com. We are produced by Rococo Punch. Our podcast artwork is by Catrell Thomas. Special thanks to our colleagues Brock Read, Sarah Brown, Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez, Laura Krantz, Carmen Mendoza, Ron Coddington, Joshua Hatch, and all of the people at The Chronicle who make this show possible. I’m Jack Stripling. Thanks for listening.