As the campus of Colorado State University grows, finding a place to park is becoming more challenging. Parking Services is turning to the campus community for feedback to help create a new parking plan for the next 10 years, which could be implemented by next year.
One of the ideas proposed is a tiered parking system. Permits for the most popular on-campus lots — those closest to classes and the library — would be more expensive than those that are barely used.
“How much they want to pay to park, based on proximity in the campus, based on the demand and desirability of those spaces,” said Dave Bradford, director of Parking and Transportation Services. “Right now we have a concentrated demand in the core of campus, where we have anywhere from 500 to 800 spaces on the perimeter of campus that stay empty every day.”
Employees of the transportation options group have been interviewing students and staff to better understand problems people are having commuting to campus.
There are just under 10,000 parking spaces on campus. Due to constant construction, Bradford expects to lose up to 2,000 of those spaces over the next 12 to 24 months.
“We have to have a plan on how we respond to that and how we provide additional options for our customers,” Bradford said. “We need to look at where we place them and where the demand is, both today and growing in the next 10 years.”
The team has been presenting this plan to stakeholder groups at CSU to get feedback and supporters of the movement. As of now, to park on campus students and staff must purchase a permit that corresponds to a parking lot. Permit price varies depending on whether the student lives on campus or is a commuter.
Danielle Wesolowski, an agricultural sciences major, believes that the tier system would work better than the current system.
“It’s kind of ridiculous that we all pay the same when we can’t all park in the same areas because of over crowding,” Wesolowski said. “The parking tiers guarantee you a spot for what you’ve paid for and personally I’d rather pay more to park in the library or the LSC lot or anything closer than Z.”
As a part of the green initiative, parking services also plans to make it easier to commute to campus using public transportation.
This year they have teamed up with ASCSU to fund the Around The Horn shuttle, a new bus service to the foothills and VTH campuses as well as additional bus service in the neighborhoods surrounding campus.
“If public transportation came every 15 minutes or so I would definitely take it way more,” Wesolowski said.
The plan will be presented to ASCSU at the Nov. 12 senate meeting. Once the plan has been presented to the Parking Services Committee, the group will prepare a final document to be submitted to the vice president of university operations. The final decision will be made through the administration.
Collegian Reporter Veronica Baas can be reached at news@collegian.com and on Twitter @vcbaas.
