After some digging, I managed to find the master plan of Parking and Transportation’s long term goals. They cleverly hid it with the title “USF Master Plan – Parking & Transportation Analysis.”
As it stands, regional mass transit will always get short shrift, since the analysis determined that regional transit is a non-solution to the growing problem of overflowing, oversold parking lots.
From page one of the master plan: “Public transit will not significantly decrease the numbers of individuals driving to USF. The best transit investment USF can make is to upgrade its existing system, and to work toward developing a ‘Upass’ system with the local transit agency.”
Translation: Build four parking garages in the next five years, raise parking rates, charge higher student transit fees, and add a fare for the on-campus shuttle. Then hope that PATS can muscle HARTline into offering reduced fare semester passes for students in exchange for increased ridership.
The report is filled with interesting information though. For example, for a year I complained about the poor state of the engineering parking situation, citing frequently overflowing parking lots. Turns out I was right. The two primary lots for the engineering building were found to be at 100% and 99.6% capacity, respectively. This means that out of 921 parking spaces, two spots were available.
So I wasn’t making it up after all, we really did have the worst parking on campus. Reference page 13 of the master plan. When they say “they were also the most likely to take more than 10 minutes to find a parking space,” it should be noted “more than 10″ means 30 on a typical day.
Yes, parking around engineering sucks — I figured that out 2 years ago. Ever since then I’ve bought park’n'ride passes, and take the shuttle or walk in from the remote lots. The pass is cheaper and I get my weekly exercise walking back and forth. Plus I’ve never once been unable to find a parking spot, meaning my ETA to class is constant and I don’t have to pad my morning schedule. YMMV.
You may want to wait until you graduate to exercise your free speech rights and to express your basic and healthy mistrust of authority. They may be watching.
I certainly don’t mean to downplay the parking situation for Engineering students, but I would wager that Public Health has it worse. No graduate students were consulted during the most recent reorganization of the parking lots/shuttles, and so with Public Health being a graduate-level-only program, there was nobody around to object when the few spaces we had were turned into visitor and staff spaces save a single row on the northwest side of campus.
After a lot of complaining, the Public Health Student Association managed to get another row of spaces, but it is still woefully insufficient. Some Public Health students who purchased their parking permits before the changes were announced have returned them in protest. I consider myself fortunate to live close enough to campus that parking is not an issue, but that may not be the case next year.
Thanks for your investigation into this.
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