Would a parking garage reduce parking problems at colleges?

Question

Explain why you feel this way.

Answer 1

Ask your civil engineering school.  But here's my opinion.  It's been proven over and over that new capacity is very quickly filled by new driving.

The more you provide, the more they will use -- right up to their threshold of pain, when driving sucks worse than something else, they'll switch to that.  Add capacity and more people will drive!  Until they have saturated the new capacity, and they again hit their "threshold of pain" and switch to alternatives. Ultimately, that "threshold of pain" is what determines congestion factors in a city.   That is a social factor.

So if you build parking garages, it will make driving easier (the first day) so many more people will drive!  Within 6 months (or a school year), parking will be just as bad as it was before.  Except now more people are driving so less are on alternatives like transit, so those alternatives get cut. Now you're worse off.  Now people are even more dependent on driving, and the threshold of pain rises further.

No, unless you're willing to build way more than enough parking for everybody, IMO it will just make things worse.  And you won't build a parking surplus.  Why?  Cost.  

You do realize parking structures cost over $25,000 per added spot (as compared to a parking lot) right?  Check out construction costs of parking garages in your area - minus the capacity of the flat parking lot it replaced. The structure costs more than the cars in it!  

Now plug that into a mortgage amortizer (say 6% simple interest) and figure out the monthly mortgage per spot -- how much you must collect (beyond toll collection costs) just to pay the mortgage.   How much toll would you need to charge assuming there are 180 school days in a year (no one would pay to park there on school holidays)?

Answer 2

Making students pay $250/mo to park their cars on campus would reduce parking problems.  Welcome to the real world.

A parking garage, if it contained more parking spaces than the lot it was built on, would have to reduce parking problems, even if only by a few spaces.  The real question is, would the parking garage reduce parking problems enough to offset the cost of the project?

Answer 3

Many colleges have parking garages.  They do help, but they are expensive and cause the surrounding streets to get more congested.

Answer 4

Mr. Harper makes an excellent point about the insane cost of a structure that large.  It is also true that more people would start driving.  Think of every road that's ever been widened.  Even a month later, traffic is even heaver, because there is more room available.  I would add on that parking garages are more dangerous.  I've known more people robbed/mugged/raped/killed in parking garages than in parking lots just because there were more places to hide, and more dark corners.  Then again, until people are allowed to carry concealed handguns on campus legally, no place will be safe...

Answer 5

My thoughts are yes, they would.

As a commuter at a popular East Tx, school, I had to park in BFE and hike far enough to make my having bothered to pay $20/semester for parking seem like a farce. If you consider the time I spent walking from where I could park to classes in various buildings, a parking garage at $0.50/ shot that was centrally located to campus would make sense to me.

I argued the point in the campus paper, only to have the president of the university argue that they were ugly, and he wouldn't have one on his campus. I delivered pictures of SMU's parking garages that matched the general architecture of the campus, only to be thrown out of his office with my pictures thrown just after me and immediately prior to the door of his office being slammed.

As an increasing number of students have cars, and fewer campuses are expanding, well placed, multilevel parking facilities would do wonders for the parking situation.

It's a more efficient use of land when compared to a flattop parking lot. From a utilities stand point, the electricity to run the facility is usually offset by the storm water charges on the utility bills for building more parking lots. Done properly, if you don't know it's a parking garage, you'll never notice. It can pay the revenue for the construction with a bond, and generate a decent profit for the university.

Hospitals, airports, government buildings, shopping malls and several college campuses have resorted to multi-level parking areas.

By constructing a multi-level parking facility, you lower the risk of a jailhouse lawyer that commutes from realizing that if he doesn't buy a parking pass in the first place and has access to several vehicles from parking where ever the h**l he wants; he gets a $5 ticket he can ignore, comes back with a different car, causing someone that took a lunch date out to have to park off campus.

Due to an error in paperwork, and having to swap cars with my family depending on needs, I was able to park for free anywhere I felt like parking. When I finally had to register my car with the university, I got about $300 in parking fines for that car alone removed by claiming I hadn't owned it when it incurred the parking tickets.

You'd also avoid the loss of revenue from clowns like myself, who when I finally registered my car with the university, put double stick tape between the parking decal and the windshield, and would swap it with a friend that would drive down to go out for drinks; (I'd take the sticker off my car, put it on the windshield of their's) and I'd find a $75 fine for a forged sticker in the mail. (I was a little tactless dealing with those.)

So at what point does it not make sense to build a parking garage? My Alma Matter was already to the point of sending campus officers off campus to escort unescorted women home after dark. I shudder to think what part of my tuition paid for that.

I'm not going to break out the calculator right now, but it seems to me that a multi-level parking facility, even with bonds and interest, is probably a better solution to campus parking than the systems already in place.

Answer 6

A parking lot that holds , say, a thousand cars, can hold 5000 cars with a 5 level parking garage.Saw this a a GM facility in Norwood OH back in the 70's