Campus Parking - The Step Child of UCD

Tried to get a parking spot on campus lately?  Try again!

Campus parking has always been a  source of friction at UCD - Anyone who has ever had to park here knows that it's hard to find, expensive and if you mess up - really expensive!

I thought I would take a look at the different aspects of parking from a design perspective and see what I could come up with.  

Historically as the campus has grown "real estate", or the  space available for buildings and classrooms has become a hot commodity.  Often, parking lots have been sacrificed to make way for new residence and instructional halls.  With enrollment continuing to increase almost every year since Davis started this had exacerbated the difficulty of providing enough spaces for all the cars that need to be on campus.  Wait a minute...do all these cars really need to be on campus?  Probably not.  

One of the most overlooked potential solutions to the parking problem is simply sliming down the number of cars that are on campus at any given time.  But how do we do that/  Well, here's one solution.  

For an answer we can look to UC Irvine - At UC Irvine  Freshmen or sophomores are not allowed to have cars.   When compared to other schools their parking problems are much less.  The system is less impacted.  

So what other problems are there ?  How about bad publicity?  The parking program has a bad reputation.  Not what you would think of as a normal problem but it's true.  If you look at it from a standpoint of negativity.  People commonly refer  and the parking attendants as Parking Nazis.

Rather than blame them, a solution might be to change the scope of their job.  For one thing, they are required to fill a quota for tickets.  This is to generate funds and the campus has actually come to rely on the funds.  The thing is, their job should be to enforce the rules with the overall goal being everyone following the rules and things running smoothly.  If officers have imposed quotas then it puts them in the position where they want people to violate the rules and this stands in direct opposition to the goal of having everything run well.

So the solution to this - remove the quotas and start a more positive based training for the enforcement officers.  Sounds a little mushy why not try it.  If it doesn't work, try something else.