There are two kinds of people in the world: those who value parking lots and those who don’t. Both groups are holding their ground in a campus debate about the expansion of the law school parking lot. The anti-lot party has the more enlightened argument. Unfortunately, it’s also the harder argument to defend.
A new law school building is going to overtake some parking spaces in the lot next to Pioneer Theatre. In order to make up for the lost spaces, new parking will extend onto the grass next to the campus garden. The garden itself will not be paved over.
“The loss of parking will have a disastrous effect on the parking of Pioneer Theatre,” said Alma Allred, director of Commuter Services, “and they need to accommodate the patrons of the theater who come to over a hundred events a year.” Many elderly patrons, Allred said, cannot be expected to park at the stadium lot and walk or shuttle to the theater.
Allred said he defends parking spaces whenever possible, noting that when he started as director of Commuter Services, campus had 17,000 parking spaces for students and faculty. It now has less than 10,000. There is a whole segment of the student population, he said, that cannot feasibly take public transportation.
“Someone who leaves home for school, drops off children at day care on the way then goes straight to work until midnight, can’t use UTA,” he said.
The parking spaces next to the garden, though, will not make life easier for triangulators, since they will be faculty-only parking spaces.
The elderly theater patrons have a legitimate concern, but there should be other voices at the table.
One of the near-term goals outlined in the U’s 2010 Climate Action Plan is to “improve walkability and universal access through environmental design … To create accessible and safe routes throughout campus for all non-motorized users.”
“Accessible and safe” does not describe the route that pedestrians take from the stadium or the south campus TRAX stations to central campus. The route from the stadium to the TRAX station is dominated by parking lots until the campus garden comes into view. That view has value worth protecting, says garden steward Terence Duff.
“It’s an aesthetic thing,” Duff said. “Even if you’re not involved in the garden, when you see the flowers, the bees and birds, you’re much happier than when you walk through a hot asphalt parking lot.”
The positive impact green space has on passersby is harder to gauge than the inconvenience of lost parking spaces for senior citizens. It takes an enlightened policy-maker to recognize that the garden and all pedestrians benefit from the buffers green spaces create between human beings and machines.
Myron Willson, director of the Office of Sustainability, said the current proposals for the new parking lot do not specifically conflict with the CAP’s goals. “The main issue from our office is whether or not the university is doing all it can to reduce traditional auto traffic and the impacts associated with them,” Willson said.
Bradley DeHerrera, volunteer coordinator for the campus garden at the Bennion Center, said he would like to see the school do more to demonstrate its commitment to sustainability. “Parking should go vertical,” he suggested. “That would really show that we appreciate the open space we have.”
University planners should recognize that the benefit of green space is harder to recover than the benefit of parking. Kingsbury Hall and Libby Gardner Concert Hall patrons adjust to manage with the parking limitations there. But hundreds of campus pedestrians won’t simply find new green space to walk past. The loss will hurt a broad swath of the U’s community.