Every student campus in the country seems to have a parking problem. Trent is no different. Despite ever-increasing parking fees, more and more students, staff, faculty and visitors seem to drive to Trent. The obvious and easy fix for Trent's administration? Simply build more more parking lots.
Last week, a notice was posted on Trent staff accounts that the administration was considering building a new 25-space parking lot on the north-east end of the campus to deal with the influx of demand for parking spaces on the east side of the campus. The majority of classes are on the east side, most notably Trent's largest lecture hall, which seats between 300 and 400 people.
This got a few of us on campus fairly ticked off. One professor in particular was quite angered by the approach taken by the university. We quickly noticed several problems with the plan:
1) A new parking lot of 25 spaces will do little to actually satisfy the increased demand for parking,
2) Parking lots are less than environmentally friendly, especially when you take into account the ripped out trees and the fact that more cars will be driving to the school,
3) Parking lots are expensive! A typical surface-level parking lot is $4000 per space. This one parking lot will cost upwards of $100,000. That's outrageous.
4) It's a band-aid solution that does nothing to account for the actual source of the problem: people driving cars.
The professor quickly contacted those who might be interested, particularly those in the administration, as well as local green groups. He proposed instituting programs that might reduce the demand for driving, such as bike-friendly programs, car-pooling and public transit initiatives. These types of projects could certainly reduce the demand for parking by 25 people per day and at a far lesser cost than the parking lot.
One particular problem at Trent is not the total influx of cars, but rather the demand to park on the east side of the campus. The west side has tons of parking spaces that are frequently only half-filled. But they are so far away from everything that people are willing to pay the extra cost to park closer to the school. The solution may simply lie in playing with the prices of parking to such a degree that it becomes much more attractive to park on the west side of campus.
Even the parking authority got back to us asking for ideas because (they claimed) they don't want to build new parking lots.
This week, we were surprised to see construction crews ripping out trees and preparing to level out the land to put in the new parking lot. Clearly, the notice posted was not intended to be a request for consultation, but rather a statement advising us that it will be noisy for the next while.
Despite the enthusiastic dialogue with the administrative departments, this project had been approved ages ago, since it isn't that easy to approve a $100K project one day and have it constructed a few days later.
Trent has been doing a lot of silly spending these days -- no thanks to the inflow of cash being doled out for infrastructure projects under the federal stimulus. It has also taken a lot of flack for its involvement in a wide range of projects that have arguably lacked consultation. Hopefully it will soon slow itself down, talk to people and think about some of the decisions it is making.
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