The parking situation at ASU is horrible. On main campus, we have somewhere in the neighborhood of 18,000 parking spots between six parking structures and roughly 50 surface lots. When you take this number and consider our main campus enrollment of 48,901, plus faculty and an estimated 2,000 visitors a day, we run into problems.
The new structure being built in Lot 59 will help this problem, but it is not nearly enough to solve it.
Where do we go from here? The way I see it, we've got a few options.
First, we could rage against the Parking and Transit Services machine and riot. While I really like this solution, and I would love the see a PTS golf-cart bonfire as much as the next guy, this will not really accomplish anything. Or would it? Hmm...
If that doesn't work, we could try to pressure PTS to speed up the completion of its master plan to provide more spots on campus. But even when the master plan is complete, there still will not be enough spaces because that plan doesn't properly take into account student population growth.
The PTS master plan states that enrollment is only growing at a rate of 0.56 per cent a year. This number seems incongruent, considering the current enrollment numbers and the fact the President Crow expects ASU to have 90,000 students in the not-so-distant future.
Finally, the most realistic of all the solutions would be to use a tiered parking system, which would take into account things like class and residence location in deciding who gets first dibs at parking spaces.
With a very limited number of parking spaces, we need to start differentiating among those who really need a spot on campus on a given day and those for whom it is merely a convenience.
For example, does every dorm-dwelling freshman really need to have the same chance at getting a parking spot as the upperclassmen who live off campus?
No. If ASU followed the lead of many other schools by not allowing freshman to get parking passes, it would free up a large number of spots and help to foster a closer campus community. Forcing dorm residents to stay on campus for things such as food would go a long way in creating a more unified campus.
It should also be harder to get a pass for people who live within one mile of campus. It takes most students longer to walk from Lot 59 to their class than it takes these people to walk from their front doors - they don't need to clog our parking structures and lots.
Last but not least, let's not forget the faculty. ASU faculty members are not immune to the parking problems that we experience. I don't know how many times I have seen professors walking all the way across campus in the Arizona heat to teach a class that is 15 minutes from their car. While this distance may not sound too bad, picture lugging around 300 graded papers in 110-degree weather.
Want a good way to retain world-class faculty? Give them a good parking spot.
So whether you want to e-mail PTS or start a golf-cart bonfire, make sure you let it know that it needs to do something to remedy the parking situation. With more than $7.5 million that PTS will rake in this year in revenues, I'm sure it can find the funds to do something as simple as implement a tiered parking system.
The writer is probably trying to sneak in Structure 5 right now, but you can reach him at grant.klinzman@asu.edu.
