Sunday, August 23, 2009
Hokies love their cars too much
Christian Trejbal
Recent columns
- Montgomery schools' $6.2 million deficit
- This column does not compute
- Make political parties pay for their primaries
- Tough times ahead for schools
From the RoundTable blog
The annual end-of-summer traffic mess hit Blacksburg last week. Students poured into town. As they moved into dorms, apartments and rental houses, their vehicles clogged roads and parking areas.
The cars, trucks and SUVs, the clunkers and the too-generous graduation gifts will linger for months. Some parents drop Johnny off and tell him they will pick him up for the winter break. Too many students, though, believe they need a car on campus.
Many want a means to escape for a weekend trip if only home for Mom's cooking and laundry services. Others demand private transportation to class, the store and parties in a town well served by public transportation. More than three-quarters of students, staff and faculty drive alone to campus.
Virginia Tech makes it easy for them. Roads crisscross campus and carve the perimeter of the iconic Drillfield. Many of the views from off campus feature vast expanses of striped hardtop, Hokie-stone facades rising behind rows of cars.
Tech has about 14,000 parking spaces, and more are on the way. A parking deck will rise from the commuter lots along Prices Fork Road. It will provide about 800 net new spaces. The school plans to build at least two more garages after that.
It also completed a massive intersection expansion at Prices Fork and West Campus Drive this summer that will allow commuters to flow in and out more easily.
At least garages are preferable to surface lots. They maximize the use of precious ground at the growing school, and they do not cast off as much polluted rainwater.
At the same time, Tech officials say they want students, staff and faculty to give up their cars.
The school offers incentives to people who carpool to campus. It encourages bike riders and walkers by building trails and bike lanes. The Tech community has access to Blacksburg Transit buses. And starting this year, students can sign up for a car-share program.
Those who choose alternative modes can enroll in a free Bike, Bus & Walk service that entitles them to special parking permits and emergency rides home. Only about 1,400 did so last year.
That bifurcated approach is not sustainable.
The parking deck under construction will cost at least $25 million, paid for from parking fees that will likely skyrocket. Yet officials cannot come up with enough money to provide more bike racks -- especially around dorms -- or to implement a bike-share program.
The transportation schizophrenia goes all the way to the top. The same board of visitors that approved new garages adopted a Climate Action Commitment and Sustainability Plan in June. The plan calls for reducing greenhouse gas emissions tremendously in coming years, in part by convincing people to drive less.
Cars contribute only about 8 to 10 percent of all campus emissions. That might not sound like much in the grand scheme of things, but when the school wants to cut its emissions to 80 percent of 1990 levels in the coming decades, it needs to shave every percent it can.
Providing more parking spaces makes it easier for people to travel by car instead of bike, bus or foot.
If administrators are truly committed to sustainability, they could slash parking demand quickly with one bold step. Their sustainability plan suggests adopting a "no freshman car rule" by 2025. Fewer cars would mean less greenhouse gas emissions and less need to devote the landscape to pavement.
The distant lots that now hold resident freshmen's cars could serve commuters. If commuters had to park a healthy walk away from classrooms in the Cage or the Chicken Hill lots, they might find the bus or a bike more attractive.
Other Virginia schools, including the University of Virginia and the College of William and Mary, already have such rules. Why wait?
As long as Tech serves cars so well, it will undercut its efforts to promote alternative transportation and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
