Transportation and Parking: Working to understand the issues and develop solutions
Survey invitation coming soon!
Last year, the CFPC worked with Walker Parking Consultants to understand our issues around parking and transportation as well as the impact of College-generated traffic on local roadways and on the environment. This year the CFPC is following its own recommendations developed over the course of last year's study.
These recommendations include engaging the campus community to determine:
- Where faculty, staff, and students live and how they currently get to and from campus
- What transportation alternatives are palatable and viable
- How alternatives need to be enhanced, subsidized, and supported to make them feasible
The purpose of this engagement is to collect the information needed from across the College, from the Academic Senate, Staff Council, Associated Students, and others involved in this process, in order to provide Cabinet and the president a recommendation to implement a suite of transportation demand management (TDM) strategies such as supplemental transit bus service or shuttle service, carpooling, vanpooling, and related support services noted above.
While the College has considered increasing the parking supply, space constraints might suggest that capacity would be added in the form of a parking garage. The most likely location would be the Filippi lot. Current designs would yield a net gain of less than 200 spaces at a cost of $10 to $15 million. This would be financially unsustainable, and ultimately inadequate to meet campus needs, especially if continued development reduces the parking inventory (and potentially increases demand). As such, we have decided to pursue a different path; a path that could be more environmentally and financially sustainable.
It is not our intention to limit or prohibit individuals’ ability to park on campus; we want to ensure that parking will be available to those who need it. We also want to ensure that commuters have choices. Because the average commuter spends thousands of dollars a year commuting (gas, oil, tires, maintenance, repairs, wear-and-tear, depreciation, etc.), we believe we can save our commuters money, particularly those who are most financially vulnerable. At the same time, we can operate an equitable parking and transportation system, in which those who use parking resources pay for them, rather than spreading the cost among the whole campus and spending tuition dollars. Such a system would also have the benefit of lowering the number of single occupancy vehicles coming to campus; vehicles that need to park, use local roadways, and generate carbon emmissions.
The CFPC is currently working with Walker Parking Consultants to develop and recommend to the president of the College a holistic, sustainable, efficient, financially responsible, environmentally friendly, and customer-service friendly approach to balancing campus supply and demand. This approach would be custom-tailored to Saint Mary’s and would include offering sustainable, viable, and reliable options to single-occupancy vehicle commuting. This approach would also address the town of Moraga's concerns about the environmental impact of College traffic on local roadways and neighbors.
To this end, we have developed a survey. The purpose of this survey is to help us understand the needs, attitudes, behaviors, and desires of Saint Mary’s commuters. We are seeking to understand:
- Why our campus community members need their own cars on campus every day
- What would make alternatives like transit, carpooling, and vanpooling appealing
- How we can support commuters needs for daytime mobility and ability to respond to urgent family needs.
Please take the time to participate in this survey and provide your candid feelings and opinions. We want to help you meet your accessibility, sustainability, and/or financial goals. Your feedback, and your time is valuable; we look forward to hearing from you!
Thank you,
Campus Facilities Planning Committee