UA's Eternal Parking Woes

By Inger Sandal
ARIZONA DAILY STAR
September 11, 2003

The University of Arizona would need 2,000 more parking places to accommodate everyone who wants to park on campus this semester.  Even if there was enough room, Patrick J. Kass, director of UA Parking and Transportation, said that would put too many cars on a campus surrounded by a growing city. A long-range campus development plan the Arizona Board of Regents approved this summer would only increase on-campus parking by 800 spaces.

The plan recommends discouraging more cars from coming on campus and using off-campus park-and-ride lots and neighborhood shuttle programs as the campus grows from 37,000 students to 40,000, and from 8.6 million square feet of building space to more than 17 million.

As of Tuesday, the UA had issued nearly 18,000 parking permits and had 3,738 names on a waiting list, including some duplicates. Kass said he thinks 2,000 more spaces would meet the entire need, though, because not all students have classes every day.

The semester started with 12,219 available spaces for permit-holders for an inventory that includes lots, parking garages and off-campus park-and-ride lots. That's somewhat more than last year's 10,358.

Over the next four months, the UA will embark on a new era of research construction that will take out 646 spaces in surface lots, but UA officials will add 575 new spaces in different areas, Kass said. After this semester, the largest parking lot near the Arizona Health Sciences Center will succumb to earthmovers. 

Third-year pharmacy student Amy Bates knows her days of parking right across the street from her classes are numbered.

"I think it stinks," Bates said last week as she unloaded books from her car in the first row of parking spaces.

The lot - 508 spaces on East Mabel Street west of North Campbell Avenue - will be history once construction starts on Roy P. Drachman Hall, 105,000 square feet of classrooms and offices.  

Next month, nearly 150 parking spaces will make way for the $65.7 million Institute for Biological Science and the $54.35 million Medical Research Building.

Meanwhile, parking on the southwestern part of campus has improved with the completion of the Sixth Street garage, which has about 1,600 spaces that are already sold out.  This is the first year UA has about as many spaces in parking structures as in the less-expensive surface lots that once ruled campus parking. UA, which opened its first parking garages in 1988, today has six and could one day have twice as many, with some reaching as high as seven levels, Kass said.

Bates will be starting her new career by the time the UA opens a parking structure north of Speedway at the Highland underpass in August 2005. An additional parking structure is planned for the north side of campus along Cherry Avenue near Mabel by 2008. The parking garages won't add spaces as much as they will concentrate existing parking, Kass said, which should reduce congestion caused by drivers who cruise surface lots looking for openings.

"Ideally, we'd like to not have that neighborhood eaten up," said Nora Dodson, president of the North University Neighborhood Association, which stretches north from Speedway to East Elm Street between Campbell Avenue and the east side of Park Avenue. That's where the bulk of the research construction will go. The impact on neighbors should be minimized, she said. For example, cars shouldn't line up in front of homes while waiting to enter a parking garage.

Past neighborhood association president Grace Rich said she opposes any parking structures in the area because she believes they contribute to congestion and pollution. The UA and the city should team up to provide more public transportation, she said.

Tucson should pursue long-term solutions such as light rail, said Dyer Lytle, president of the adjacent Jefferson Park Neighborhood Association.

"Lots of people could come in that way instead of using their cars," Lytle said. The UA's CAT Tran shuttle provided 400,000 rides last year - up 50 percent over the past four years - and is expected to top 500,000 this year. It is part of the reason the UA was one of the Tucson employers named as "Best Workplaces for Commuters" last month by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. More than 2,000 employees participate in carpool and RideShare programs and there are more than 9,000 bicycles on campus.

Last year, the UA paid $200,000 to subsidize 2,630 bus passes for students, employees and faculty members, and this year it plans to subsidize 3,500 at a cost of $300,000. UA added spaces this year in part by opening its sixth parking lot off-campus, which at $115 a year costs about half the price of $235 surface lots and a fraction of the $450 it costs to park in a campus garage.

"I think it's a much more convenient alternative for students to park in one of our park-and-ride lots and be shuttled into campus as opposed to driving around neighborhoods trying to find a street without parking restrictions," Kass said.

Surrounding neighborhoods within a mile of the campus without parking restrictions have become the exception and some are petitioning for tighter limits, said Chris Leighton, who coordinates the city's ParkWise program.

Leighton, a UA alumnus, said he believes a mile is about as far as most people are willing to park to walk to campus. He noted that the city sells nonresident parking permits for some areas near campus for upwards of $400.

Leesa Hicks, a city traffic-enforcement agent, writes about 65 tickets a day around the UA and said the neighborhoods on the north and south sides of campus keep her the busiest.

* Contact reporter Inger Sandal at 573-4115 or isandal@azstarnet.com.

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