It's criminal how many people graduate from Civil Engineering programs in 2025 and get jobs planning transportation projects in cities... yet they have maybe only taken 1 or 2 transportation courses -- probably highway engineering, haven't ridden a bike since they were a child, haven't ever read a single NACTO publication, never ride the bus, and have never traveled outside of the U.S. to see how global cities manage multi-modal transportation. Totally crazy.
I often say if I was made Education Czar over transportation planning & engineering, I'd make almost all the curriculum related to anthropology, psychology, sociology, and advertising. They'll learn the technical details & software with a mentor on the job.
On the costs of building parking garages and its consequences on a college campus—it is a tragedy of good intentions.
The following is true for many public institutions.
The state mandates a bifurcation of the budget between educational & non-educational—what are called ‘auxiliary services’ that support the university’s mission. These services constitute auxiliary enterprise functions, i.e., dining programs, residential programs, parking services.
These services are operated in a manner similar to a business operation and are funded by the direct users of the services. Thus, each service must have self-sufficient operations every year. (revenue = costs exactly).
For parking, it is all funded by direct users. If you have a car and need to park on campus, you pay for a parking permit. This sounds fair. People who need to park on campus pay a fee to park. In return, that fee pays for parking enforcement and parking upkeep. In other words, the people who park pay for the maintenance of all parking lots and the salary of all ticketing officers and administrators. But a deeper look demonstrates that this is not a fair system and works against most schools’ goals.
In a business, all facets of the business must be paid for labor, maintenance, and land. It is this last category, land, that explains why this auxiliary service is business like. Parking does not rent its land from the university. It may use it for free. But simply because something is free does not mean there is not a cost.
Essentially, the effect of this is that parking is a never satisfied monster slowly eating away at campus. People want parking and parking is underpriced. Public schools can only change the price by building more parking because otherwise costs would not equal revenue.
And this creates silly outcomes like the fact that if an organization purchased all the underpriced on-street parking on my campus to build a network of bike lanes and then charged students an annual fee—the cost would be ~$5 a student which a lot of people would like but no org can do that—so we don’t have bike lanes.
The out is that the schools have a lot of latitude in setting up auxiliary enterprises so if they wanted to combine all transit activities under one auxiliary enterprise they could do things like reapportion parking fees to offset bus costs. But I’ve yet to see anyone do that…
Are dorms cheaper? At the university I went to, there was never enough on campus housing. I lived a 30min drive away and no bus system between North Pole and Fairbanks. Biking wasn’t an option, especially in the winter. I did find someone to carpool with. UAF did charge a lot for parking passes and the fines for not having them were steep. I paid for parking every semester. I wouldn’t have lived in the dorms anyway, but I knew others who would have. So that brings me back to wondering if dorms are cheaper than parking garages.
The University of Toronto recently opened a 237 space garage under Kings College Circle, the biggest open green space on campus. They greenwashed it by putting in a massive ground source heat pump system and claim " It’s a project that has transformed the St. George campus core into a greener, more sustainable, accessible, and pedestrian friendly space and our new underground parking lot is an integral part of that transformation. " Nobody ever talks about the upfront carbon emissions from the concrete required to build a garage, let alone the problem of 237 more cars- there is just a complete disconnect here.
It's criminal how many people graduate from Civil Engineering programs in 2025 and get jobs planning transportation projects in cities... yet they have maybe only taken 1 or 2 transportation courses -- probably highway engineering, haven't ridden a bike since they were a child, haven't ever read a single NACTO publication, never ride the bus, and have never traveled outside of the U.S. to see how global cities manage multi-modal transportation. Totally crazy.
I often say if I was made Education Czar over transportation planning & engineering, I'd make almost all the curriculum related to anthropology, psychology, sociology, and advertising. They'll learn the technical details & software with a mentor on the job.
On the costs of building parking garages and its consequences on a college campus—it is a tragedy of good intentions.
The following is true for many public institutions.
The state mandates a bifurcation of the budget between educational & non-educational—what are called ‘auxiliary services’ that support the university’s mission. These services constitute auxiliary enterprise functions, i.e., dining programs, residential programs, parking services.
These services are operated in a manner similar to a business operation and are funded by the direct users of the services. Thus, each service must have self-sufficient operations every year. (revenue = costs exactly).
For parking, it is all funded by direct users. If you have a car and need to park on campus, you pay for a parking permit. This sounds fair. People who need to park on campus pay a fee to park. In return, that fee pays for parking enforcement and parking upkeep. In other words, the people who park pay for the maintenance of all parking lots and the salary of all ticketing officers and administrators. But a deeper look demonstrates that this is not a fair system and works against most schools’ goals.
In a business, all facets of the business must be paid for labor, maintenance, and land. It is this last category, land, that explains why this auxiliary service is business like. Parking does not rent its land from the university. It may use it for free. But simply because something is free does not mean there is not a cost.
Essentially, the effect of this is that parking is a never satisfied monster slowly eating away at campus. People want parking and parking is underpriced. Public schools can only change the price by building more parking because otherwise costs would not equal revenue.
And this creates silly outcomes like the fact that if an organization purchased all the underpriced on-street parking on my campus to build a network of bike lanes and then charged students an annual fee—the cost would be ~$5 a student which a lot of people would like but no org can do that—so we don’t have bike lanes.
The out is that the schools have a lot of latitude in setting up auxiliary enterprises so if they wanted to combine all transit activities under one auxiliary enterprise they could do things like reapportion parking fees to offset bus costs. But I’ve yet to see anyone do that…
Are dorms cheaper? At the university I went to, there was never enough on campus housing. I lived a 30min drive away and no bus system between North Pole and Fairbanks. Biking wasn’t an option, especially in the winter. I did find someone to carpool with. UAF did charge a lot for parking passes and the fines for not having them were steep. I paid for parking every semester. I wouldn’t have lived in the dorms anyway, but I knew others who would have. So that brings me back to wondering if dorms are cheaper than parking garages.
The University of Toronto recently opened a 237 space garage under Kings College Circle, the biggest open green space on campus. They greenwashed it by putting in a massive ground source heat pump system and claim " It’s a project that has transformed the St. George campus core into a greener, more sustainable, accessible, and pedestrian friendly space and our new underground parking lot is an integral part of that transformation. " Nobody ever talks about the upfront carbon emissions from the concrete required to build a garage, let alone the problem of 237 more cars- there is just a complete disconnect here.
🤦♂️