Transportation & Sustainable Campus Communities: Issues, Examples, Solutions

By Will Toor and Spenser W. Havlick Island Press, 2004, 293 pp., hardcover $60; paperback $30. This new book by Will Toor, director of the University of Colorado Environmental Center, and Spenser W. Havlick, retired professor of environmental design at the university, tackles an important topic: how to ensure that the transportation practices of universities don’t harm the cities in which the higher education institutions operate. Universities are usually regarded as prime urban assets. They generate jobs. They create cultural life. They bring more people into a community. But they often generate traffic and pave large areas with parking lots, deadening sections of their surroundings. Toor, who also serves as mayor of Boulder, and Havlick report on a number of universities that have devised less anti-urban ways of dealing with transportation and parking. “Multiple factors — including lack of land for new parking lots, the high costs of building parking structures, pressure from surrounding communities, and the desire to preserve air quality and campus green spaces — are leading many institutions toward a new vision based upon expanded transit access, better bicycle and pedestrian facilities, and financial incentives for students, faculty, and staff to drive less,” the authors write. The new vision, they report, “goes under the general rubric of transportation demand management, or TDM.” One TDM tool is a transit pass. More than 50 universities, with more than 800,000 students and employees, offer transit passes, reducing the need for parking on campus. “Students and employees benefit from inexpensive transportation,” the authors note, while the university benefits from decreased parking supply costs, a greener appearance, and better community relations as off-campus traffic diminishes. Economics is a chief motive for TDM. “We’ve found it’s cheaper to pay folks not to park rather than build new parking,” an administrator at the University of Utah is quoted as saying. A surface lot provides about 124 parking spaces per acre, an expensive real estate investment in many urban areas. The annual cost of each parking space for the University of Colorado has been estimated at $995 a year, including land, construction, maintenance, administration, and parking enforcement. Nationally, building a parking structure over an existing lot incurs a cost of approximately $15,000 to $30,000 per net new parking space, they report. No wonder some schools have decided to supply staff or students with bus passes rather than create additional parking. Toor and Havlick effectively explain a range of techniques that universities can use to deal with transportation. To encourage bicycling, for example, they suggest a university might establish a centrally located “bike station” that offers repairs, rentals, and parts at a location convenient to cyclists. Well organized and augmented by case studies at eight schools in the US and Canada, this book presents a carefully detailed assessment of how universities can become better places for pedestrians and cyclists — and better neighbors overall. P.L. u