I’m a third-party non-employee lecturer at my local university. I teach scuba, underwater photography, and scientific diving. The courses are taught off-campus at a dive shop using the shop’s its classrooms, pool, and equipment. The liability insurance is paid by me.
There’s a lake on campus we dive at, and the university charges students to enter it.
The students have to pay $3000+ in tuition for some of my classes.
…and the university doesn’t give me or the shop a dime. The students have to pay a 200 dollar lab fee, and that’s split between me and the shop for the semester. The only thing the university provides is the course numbers and taking the money, and they get 30 times as much money as I do.
I have multiple individual cameras I use to teach the class that cost more than I make in 5 years of teaching the photography class.
And they want to charge me $800/year for parking for the rare occasions when I need to go on campus.
Fuck that - I just let them ticket me. The parking services department isn’t a law enforcement agency. The biggest threat they really have is withholding grades for students who owe parking tickets.
Its almost like university’s see you as a pay check!
Gotta get the kids ready for real life. Free parking exists in place where you dont wanna be. Like your mom’s house.
My uni charged a parking fee to every student.
You still couldn’t park unless you also bought a parking pass.
I popped into a dorm for 5 minutes to drop off a book to a friend, and paid the meter out front even though I was just gonna be there for 5 minutes.
Came out to find a ticket on my motorcycle for parking it in a car spot. There was no motorcycle parking available.
I WORKED at a university and had to pay for parking!
My employer has an attached garage that is free to us. It’s not big enough for everyone, so you better get in before 9:30 if you want a spot. Parking nearby is $18.
My Uni secretly wouldn’t give tickets during finals week because they didn’t want to drive students over the edge.
Mine withheld transcripts and diplomas if their were open tickets and absolutely would have given tickets out during finals.
My university was kind enough to offer a free lot on the far side of campus. They even had the bus go there.
They would also regularly send parking enforcement to find cars “hiding” in the lot off main campus that had delinquent fines. They would then boot the students car removing their access to transportation.
Pretty cruel since this was deep in the south and there was no functioning transit off-campus
Mine had issues with tires getting slashed, and items stolen in lots that were patrolled by campus police, who couldn’t catch the criminal. When the city police got involved, they found out it was the campus police.
Mine didn’t charge tuition fees
My first one, which was downtown, did the exact same thing, but didn’t even have enough parking for the people with passes, so everyone parked juuuuuuuuuust off campus and didn’t pay. All the houses within a 3 block radius were owned by either faculty or people who rented them to students, so they didn’t care at all. The only students who really used the lots were either living on campus and had to pay to store the vehicle anyway, or disabled people who didn’t have to pay.
The second one I transferred to, however, was amazing. Every building could be accessed via tunnels, and was set up like a wheel with spokes so each building connected to the center as well as its neighboring buildings, iirc. You could navigate the entire campus without going outside (Midwest winters). Every building also had a huge parking lot nearby, which was free because the campus was not close to anything but residential housing; campus was completely surrounded by conservation study acreage, as ecological sciences were very important there. Busses came mostly as scheduled. It was a dream of a place to go to school, honestly.
At UMD, you have to buy a parking pass, but during basketball and football games you can’t use them and you can’t park there, because they’re selling our spaces for more money to sports attendees. Insane.
Sports have been ruining academics since ancient Greece at least.
That’s the same at our university as well.
Ofcourse I work from home like 99% of the time, so this doesn’t bother me, but the principle behind paying for parking if i have to go to work, is employer double dipping your pay
Counterpoint: Fuck cars.
Very important point (VIP)
agree but unfortunately for a lot of students in the USA the only form of transit to their university is by car
It’s more an infrastructure problem. I’m so glad to have had affordable tuition, bikeable infrastructure and good public transit
The worst part is paying for the permit and still having to spend 20 minutes circling the lot like a vulture because there are zero spots left. You’re basically paying for a license to hunt for parking.
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Oh fuck did we go back in time? We got Nigerian-Prince-level scams on Lemmy now!
Dutch universities: “bike parking is free. There’s a bus stop in front of every building and busses are free for students. Why would we waste everyone’s money just so you can park for free?”
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Universities are ideal places for investing in public transit, fuck cars
You’re assuming that’s a realistic option. I’d also prefer it, but in the meantime we have to deal with reality.
Note: I live near Boston, and we have decent train service to many urban universities. It’s a great model that we should expand on, but not every school is located in a major city with transit
This is such a bad excuse for subsidizing rich kids who got free cars from their parents. I used to live in a rural town in the US and the local college had usable bike paths AND decent access to bus routes
Ironically it wasn’t until I moved to a city five times the size that I was having 1+ hour bus trips to get across town and bus times were sometimes comparable to walking due to routes being too long.
Accessibility is 100% a choice by the local government and university admins.
Edit, just to be crystal clear about feasibility:
There are situations where enough people have cars (or helicopters if theyre in an extremely wealthy area) that it might make sense to provide amenities for some travelers private accomodations but in most cases busses are often the best solution for universities and colleges because they both have massive seasonal traffic fluctuations (meaning parking investmests go unused 25% of the year and therefore parking fees need to be 33% higher to pay for annual maintenance) and because students are more likely to have issues with maintaining or replacing a car if they even have one.
I went to a university in a rural area, they invested in local bus services to make it free for students. It was cheaper than building more parking anyways
I recommend “the high cost of free parking” by Donald Shoup.
I helped my buddy with a project during our freshman year and as my payment, he sent me a photo of his parking pass and its dimensions.
Better believe I used that fake pass alllllll year. Never got caught 'neither.
I did have a buddy get caught, though, and it was quite the fine.
I am once again recommending everyone read Donald Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking.
The way a lot of students solve this in Australia, at least in Melbourne where I’m from, is by taking the train (or a tram) to university. The university I went to was adjacent to a train station.
Students from low-income families and that are independent get money from the government which can be used for anything, including public transport passes. Living on campus isn’t really a thing in Australia, so a lot of students continue to live with their parents while at uni to save money, or live at an apartment nearby.
I checked the journey to the university near me. It’s currently 2pm on a Thursday, using live travel data
- car: 14 mins
- bike: 48 mins (route illegal, as you’d have to bike on the shoulder of a 4 lane freeway)
- public transport: 1h40m, 3 changes, each with a 7 min walk between them
- on foot: 2h46 mins
Public transport to my last school was something like 4 hours, 3 changes, with a 25 minute walk between one of them. I couldn’t have left early enough to made my first class. It was a 30 minute drive. Parking was free though.
Should be more. Parking spots for non-disabled people shouldn’t be subsidized by those who don’t bring such ridiculous things on campus.
A lot of campus locations lack good public transit or local retail access for necessities.
When you don’t support any kind of parking you also make it difficult for people who have full time jobs or are continuing education as adults. Single parents also go to school, I know, I was in college as a child(obviously not enrolled.)
From a European perspective that sounds like madness. 🙃
Isn’t that basically the US’s slogan at this point?
A lot of campus locations lack good public transit or local retail access for necessities.
So that’s the problem, that’s what needs to be fixed. Not more parking.
People are too selfish in this country to consider that public services like transit end up making everything more comfortable, cheaper and better for everyone.
Expecting everyone to use a car from point A to point B means everyone has to pay to insure and maintain their car, then sit in traffic 1-2+ hours a day for their commute to where the jobs are that pay more than minimum wage and cause gridlock for everybody. Plus we all burn extra gas to make sure we accelerate the climate damage even further. It’s the motherfucking american way. oorah support our troops, bless your heart, thoughts and prayers!
So moronic.
When you don’t support any kind of parking you also make it difficult for people who have full time jobs or are continuing education as adults.
When you support more parking you ironically only make this problem even worse. Look up “induced demand.” Not to mention increased tuition (avg cost of garages is in the tens of thousands per spot) and butt ugly campuses filled with parking garages.
The real solution is more alternatives to driving so that only the people who actually have to drive do.
Robust public transit is for sure the solution in highly dense population areas.
Unfortunately it is rarely implemented in the US. A lot of foreigners have trouble grasping just how big the US is, and just how far you have to travel to get anywhere. A few hours gets you from one side of a country to another in many european and latin american nations. In the US it takes many days to drive from one side to another. Some states take many hours to cross. Robust public transit isn’t feasible in the majority of the US, and there is immense negative reactions to imminent domain.
I think you should watch this video: https://youtu.be/REni8Oi1QJQ
The US was built on rail. Almost every US city only exists because it used to be on a rail line. Most US cities used to have tram networks that were ripped out and paved over to make way for cars. LA, despite now being a sprawling car centric wasteland used to have the biggest tram network in the country. Rail is also just a far better solution to travelling vast distances than cars for many reasons, so I really don’t understand why that argument comes up again and again. Who the fuck wants to drive from New York to California? I don’t.
The reason for the dominance of cars in the US has way more to do with the power of the auto industry and the lack of political will than any real practical concerns.
The car argument is relevant because OK, you take a train from NYC to Seattle or some shit. It goes across thousands of miles. If you were to stop at a station to visit a relative along the way, you could get off the train and still be 3-5+ hours by car travel to that relative who lives in podunkville population 100.
We have an enormous amount of land that has very, very low population density. There are huge swathes that also practically have no to minimal population living there permanently.
Then we have places like Alaska that have absolutely insane supply chain (and thus costs for basic sundries) that really are only servicable by boat, plane or car unless you’re building a stretch of rail through canada.
Much of the nation doesn’t want to fund infrastructure for “city folk” and that’s just around half of the people who vote on a nationwide scale. Even with some of the super liberal areas with tons of uber left leaning wealthy people, the left leaning wealthy people still push back on policies that require changing zoning from single family (wealthy) houses to high density housing despite being on commuter rail lines. Same towns complain that education costs are way too high and that they don’t want to pay taxes for them because they just send their kids to private school anyway.
Wealthy NIMBYs rule policy for public transit, and the republican party also basically follows the philosophy of “fuck you, i’ve got mine” so although the technical solution is mass implementation of public transit, the problem is wealthy assholes controlling the media and politics, stopping any kind of major project from ever getting off the ground.
The car argument is relevant because OK, you take a train from NYC to Seattle or some shit. It goes across thousands of miles. If you were to stop at a station to visit a relative along the way, you could get off the train and still be 3-5+ hours by car travel to that relative who lives in podunkville population 100.
We have an enormous amount of land that has very, very low population density. There are huge swathes that also practically have no to minimal population living there permanently.
I’m confused. Is your argument that mass public transit isn’t realistic for students traveling to unis because a tiny % of the population lives in the middle of nowhere where it wouldn’t be feasible to access by rail alone? Places where there universities do not even exist? There are towns of less than 10K people in the US that used to be serviced by rail back when they were even smaller than that (and some that still are). Look up a picture of the US freight rail map. Even without the insane subsidies that cars receive, the most extensive freight rail network in the world has been built in the US.
To your other point, I agree that the political will for public transit is not strong enough. I think that’s a poor excuse to advocate for more car parking which will only make the situation worse.
This discussion got away from the education use case multiple comments ago.
I’m not advocating for more parking. Originally my point was to impress that you cannot just simply rip out parking today for absolutely everyone. Dorm learning and existing public transit options do not work for people with real needs, today who shouldn’t be alienated just because they do not fit into the dorm model. They are an extreme minority of students, so a very limited amount of parking is necessary for them. They often attend night classes as well, when parking lots are typically empty on college campuses. I wouldn’t be surprised if they fit into staff parking spaces in the majority of scenarios since most staff won’t be there for night classes.
Freight rail was overwhelmingly built before cars became prevalent on the household level, and then in the past 40 years or so cars went from a household level to individual ownership en masse for the majority of people of driving age who do not live in areas with extensive public transit.
Other buildouts have been way too modest. Most of the stuff that seems big is just revamping existing lines. The closest thing to a major rail project I know of coming out right now is Brightline West, a passenger line from LA to Vegas.
Schools with good public transit are a real blessing. I remember living off campus at UT Austin and missing more than a few classes due to the miserable bus schedule. A big chunk of that was the result of the bumper to bumper traffic through central Austin. But it’s a problem the city/state knew existed for decades and refused to address.
Commuter schools are even worse. They straight up don’t provide student housing, then get mad when you need student parking.
I just read about a campus building a multilevel parking lot for students who live in their cars. They could build a residence hall, but why normalize structural living, when there is no way they could afford it with their student loans. Just preparing them for reality.
Of course, the average new car price is over $50K, so cars aren’t going to be a viable living option for many, either. Perhaps they should set up a campground area on campus, for students who can only afford a tent?
I teach at a local university and it provides some free parking in addition to paid parking. Of course, the paid spaces are closer to the buildings, but at least there’s some free spaces, too.
