Just as there is no free lunch, there is no free parking either. Not even your own driveway is truly free (e.g., think about property tax on the land and snow removal). In fact, parking is darned expensive. You are probably nodding, and thinking about USM’s new transportation fee. However, I’m not referring to what you pay for parking; I’m talking about what you don’t pay for parking. Figures from the Environmental Protection Agency indicate that a single space in a surface parking lot costs approximately $600 per year to build and maintain, averaged over the lifetime of the space. A spot in an above-ground parking structure costs $1,500 per space, per year, and underground parking is a staggering $2,400 per space, per year. To put this in perspective, the cost of a surface parking spot is approximately equal to 20% of the annual tuition for a full-time USM undergraduate.
Who pays these high costs for parking on the USM campus? Some of the costs come from user fees (parking decals, fines, etc). However, a larger fraction comes from other sources such as the cities of Portland and Gorham, and of course, taxpayers. Because the costs of supplying parking are so high, USM would have a hard time charging the people who used the lots for the full costs of parking in them. What are the options? USM, at great expense, could continue to build and maintain parking lots, and to subsidize people parking in them.
Here is another vision: USM could implement a progressive transportation management plan to encourage folks to find alternatives to the single occupant vehicle, when this is possible. Stanford University recently added 2 million square feet of office, lab, and teaching space to their campus. They did this without increasing peak parking demand, and for significantly less money than they would have spent creating new parking. Their transportation plan included such features as raising parking fees near the center of campus, lowering parking fees outside this area, giving people cash back if they didn’t purchase parking decals, providing free public transit passes, and encouraging carpooling and vanpooling.
USM is required by the city of Portland to provide a certain number of parking spaces every time it increases building space on campus. If USM, perhaps through measures similar to those carried out at Stanford, could document a reduction in parking demand on campus, the city of Portland might be willing to require less on-campus parking the next time USM puts up a new building. Students, taxpayers, and USM employees would all realize savings. Fewer cars mean safer streets, cleaner air, less noise, less congestion, less road maintenance, and reduced demand for building new roads. Given the enormous environmental and social costs of our dependence on cars, it makes sense for a public institution such as USM to encourage alternatives to driving rather than making driving as painless as possible by subsidizing parking for everyone.
People do need to get to school and to work. However, many of us could use our cars less. Try this thought experiment: if the price of gas were $5.00 a gallon, would hopping in our cars suddenly be so appealing? Would we make that phone call about joining a carpool? Would we spend an extra 15 minutes to take the bus? Would we consider our transportation options when deciding where to live? Five dollars a gallon is not an unreasonable price to pay for gas. The International Center for Technology Assessment estimates that the true cost of using gasoline, when environmental, social, military, and other costs are factored in, is between $5.60 and $15.14 per gallon! (See http://www.icta.org/projects/trans/rlprexsm.htm.)
For more information about carpooling or vanpooling with other USM students and employees, please visit www.usm.maine.edu/commuter/transportation or leave a message for Sarah Wolpow at USM’s Office of Environmental Sustainability: 780-4384.