However, when the Institute accepts hundreds of dollars from students for the use of its parking lots, parking goes from being an entitlement to a business arrangement. So allow me to go on record as having said that every student who is issued a parking permit should be guaranteed a spot. If this requires spots to be spray-painted with numbers, so be it—I can be at North Lot with the official Grand Marshal’s stencil kit at a moment’s notice.

To solve the parking problem, we need to look at parking on campus the way we would look at any other commodity: the availability is governed by supply and demand. At present, supply isn’t meeting demand. It’s that simple. To solve this, we need to increase supply and decrease the demand.

Let’s start by talking about increasing the supply, that is, the number of available parking spaces.

The most obvious solution is to pave more spots. Unfortunately, it’s also the least practical. Given the cost of acquiring property, insuring it, paving it, and maintaining it, it ends up costing more for the individual spaces than it does for most cars. Lucky for us, this is RPI, and when we’re not studying for the next IEA exam or enjoying the temperate climate of upstate New York, we’re coming up with cool ideas.

Let’s start with the most basic approach: squeezing more spots out of areas where people already park by being more creative. The perfect candidates for this include Sage Avenue, College Avenue, Bouton Road, 15th Street, and Tibbits Avenue. By actually marking off parking spaces, we can efficiently allow more people to park on these streets by guaranteeing that every open space can be used, while making it less difficult to get out of the parking spaces.

Next, we can modify the shuttle routes so as to make the spots which are presently undesirable more desirable. Several of RPI’s major parking lots are located near the Houston Field House. Unfortunately, the distance makes it impractical for a lot of students. A possible solution for this would be the development of “express” shuttle routes, which would take students directly to a particular area on campus as opposed to stopping at many different locations beforehand. This would give students more incentive to purchase a Houston Field House Lot parking permit (or one for a lot nearby), knowing that shuttles aren’t going to be full when you have six minutes to get from the Field House to your 10 am class in Sage.

Meanwhile, we can decrease demand.

One easy way to do this is by putting more people in each car. Given the cost of gasoline, the amount of wear that commuting puts on vehicles, the cost of a parking permit, and the purported horrific effects of carbon dioxide on the Earth’s climate, one would think that carpooling would be more popular. We need to give people the tools they need to make this happen: namely setting up ride-boards.

Students also have the option of biking to campus, given that most of us are within a 1–2 mile proximity of campus. Right now, though, the bike racks are slim pickin’s. Members of the Student Senate are presently investigating ways to optimize what we offer to this effect.

The number of people who drive from off-campus residences around Pawling Avenue—including numerous greek houses—should be of additional concern. I am investigating the possibility of working with CDTA to better align the times its buses are traveling between Pawling Avenue and RPI’s campus with class times. This hasn’t been written in stone yet, but it is certainly being given thorough consideration.

You can help make the parking problem go away by simply reporting your problems at http://myRPI.org/, a Web site I have mentioned in the past which will have its official debut later this semester. The more data we have, the better suited we will be to craft solutions. If you’re interested in being part of that solution, e-mail the Student Senate’s Finance, Facilities, and Advancement Committee at ffa@rpisenate.com and let them know that you want to join the fight to fix the parking problem at RPI.