Students and faculty already feeling the effects of rising tuition and frozen salaries, respectively, were hardly pleased this week when the University's Department of Parking and Transportation announced a $1-per-month increase to Academic Division parking permit rates for the 2011-12 academic year. The price hikes will push the cost of a premium reserve permit up to $50 per month, and student dorm storage permits will rise to $38 per month. Although the rate increases add to the financial burden that comes with having a personal automobile at the University, they are an appropriate way for Parking and Transportation to cope with necessary maintenance expenditures, rising fuel costs for University Transit Service buses and steady enrollment growth that will continue throughout the coming years.
The level of the announced rate increases is quite reasonable when placed in historical context. Parking rates have not risen since 2008, after increasing almost every year during the previous 10 years. In fact, not only were rate hikes more common during that time but also they were of a greater magnitude. "In those years when the rates were going up, the rates were raised from $24 to $36 a year, but this year we are only raising the rates $12 a year," said Rebecca White, director of Parking and Transportation. Moreover, the fact that metered parking rates have not risen in at least 10 years suggests that their 25-cent-per-hour hike is long overdue.
Avoiding such rate increases would have been difficult given the exogenous circumstances impacting the Parking and Transportation budget. Diesel fuel prices for UTS buses have soared from an average of $2.97 per gallon in summer 2007 to a yearly average of $3.13 per gallon in 2011, with the latest delivery of fuel having cost $3.52 per gallon, according to White. Additionally, as the University adds another 1,500 students during the next five years in accordance with an enrollment growth plan recently approved by the Board of Visitors, Parking and Transportation is anticipating greater costs related to infrastructure expansion and growing demand for buses. This comes on top of scheduled maintenance and renovations to numerous parking garages across Grounds that will take place throughout the next 10 to 15 years.
Since automobile drivers are the ones most likely to benefit from parking garage improvements, it is only right that they pay a significant portion of the related costs. Furthermore, were parking rates to be kept level then cuts would have to be made to other vital Parking and Transportation services that benefit the University as a whole. Maintaining an efficient bus service is a particularly high priority, because it reduces automobile traffic through Central Grounds and mitigates the need for additional roads and parking lots that inevitably would fragment the University's purposefully interconnected layout.
None of this is to suggest the rate increases will be easy for students and faculty to bear. The University's parking rates already are substantially higher than at several peer institutions such as Virginia Tech and The College of William & Mary. Lower rates are possible at those schools, however, only because of other policies that may be unappealing to University students. William & Mary, for example, prohibits both freshmen and sophomores from having cars while they live on campus. Virginia Tech, meanwhile, features a sprawling campus that allows for additional parking but arguably detracts from a sense of community. The experiences at these schools show that the costs of various parking policies are not always expressed in terms of dollars, something that students and faculty should remember when they go to pay for their parking permits next year.
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