Last Tuesday morning I stopped by the carpool lot off Winslow Street to see how things were going. USM has taken the daring step of reserving about 40 spaces on campus for carpools of at least two people until 9:30 a.m. every morning (after 9:30 a.m., the lot opens to all USM vehicles). I use the word “daring” because some drivers are clearly angered to find that these spaces are temporarily reserved. Their frustration was evident in the cascade of dark looks I saw directed to the poor student staffing the lot as she patiently pointed out the sign indicating that the lot was reserved for carpoolers.
It is not hard to understand the frustration of those who were turned away. Many people feel the fairest solution to the allocation of parking is the principle of first come, first served. The carpool lot violates this concept of fairness. However, there are many ways to think about fairness in distributing on-campus parking spaces. Claims for these spaces are compelling, and the list of claimants is long. Without faculty there would be no classes. Without students there would be no university. Without staff there would be no heat, no food, and no toilet paper. Who gets priority? People who live far away and don’t have access to public transportation? People with jobs to juggle? People with children, who believe their lives are at least ten times more complicated than anyone else’s? (As the mother of two small kids, this last one gets my unofficial vote!)
Before we get too carried away with this discussion, let’s remember that there is plenty of parking a 10 minute walk (or shuttle ride) away in the Marginal Way lot. The issue at hand is not the critical one of whether people can get to work or to class, but the somewhat less dramatic one of whether folks get to park a bit closer to their destinations. Professors can teach, students can get to class, and physical plant workers can keep the heat on, but they may have to allocate an extra 10 minutes to their commutes. Some folks may have schedules so tight that they cannot increase their commutes by even a small amount. However, the existence of the carpool lot gives these people a better chance of finding parking. In fact, that is one of the primary purposes of the carpool lot.
Carpoolers are unique among the list of those who have a claim to on-campus parking in that they are the only ones who free up spaces for other drivers. On a campus with limited parking, this is reason enough to create reserved parking for carpoolers. When I visited the carpool lot at 8:15 a.m. there were about 15 cars present. In the absence of encouragement to carpool, each of these carpoolers might have driven to campus alone. If we conservatively assume two people per carpool, there would have been at least 30 cars parked in the lot. The remaining 10 spaces would likely have been filled earlier in the morning. Thus, the people who were glaring at the student worker during my 8:00 a.m. visit would have been unable to park in those spaces anyhow.
Nor do people need to worry that some of the spaces in the carpool lot will go unused. The carpool lot is open to all vehicles at 9:30 a.m. Providing that the lot does not fill with carpoolers by 9:30 a.m., the remaining spaces are available to any drivers who arrive after that time. Thus, some solo drivers who come in earlier may have to go elsewhere, while others who come in later may find parking. On balance, this shift is neutral for the USM community because the extra parking spaces saved by carpoolers result in a net benefit. Carpools benefit the larger community in other important ways: they halve the negative environmental impacts of a car trip, they lower everyone’s taxes (building and maintaining roads and parking spaces is a huge public expense), and they improve USM’s relationship with the surrounding community. It seems fair that we offer something in return.