Colleges Save Millions By Embracing Policies to Reduce Driving

Jeffrey Tumlin was managing transportation programs at Stanford in the mid-1990s, when he made an important finding: It was cheaper for the university to pay people not to drive than to build new parking structures.

Offering employees just $90 a year not to drive to campus was enough to entice many of them to use transit, carpools, or bicycles. Meanwhile, the annualized cost of each parking space can range from about $650 for surface spots in suburban locations to over $4,000 for structured spaces in cities, according to the Victoria Transport Policy Institute.

Stanford offered further incentive by raising parking prices 15 percent. Then, it invested $4 million in bicycle facilities, including turning a main road through campus into a bike and transit mall. This $4 million enticed 900 people out of their cars and onto bicycles, according to a case study in Transportation & Sustainable Campus Communities, by Will Toor and Spenser Havlick. Building parking facilities to accommodate those 900 people would have cost $18 million.

What Stanford had discovered was “transportation demand management,” or strategies to minimize transportation costs by reducing driving. Today almost every college and university in the country employs some form of TDM, whether it’s providing discounted transit passes for students or offering special parking rates to carpoolers.

In Stanford’s case, a combination of these programs allowed the school to increase its campus size 20 percent without increasing traffic — a stipulation that Santa Clara County insisted on. Since the early 2000s, single-occupancy car commuting among Stanford employees and students has held roughly steady, despite the university’s rapid growth. “We would probably have had to build another 3,000 parking spaces on campus,” reports Brodie Hamilton, director of parking and transportation services. “Stanford, most of its parking structures right now are going underground. Those cost about $45,000 per space to put them underground. We’ve probably saved close to $100 million in costs avoided.”

Places like Stanford and MIT — elite colleges in expensive housing markets — have been leading the way on TDM, motivated in large part by financial necessity, says Tumlin. High land costs and the lack of undeveloped land nearby make reserving large parts of campus for car storage cost-prohibitive.

Larry Brutti, operations manager at MIT’s Parking and Operations Office, said adding a single parking space on MIT’s campus costs the university about $100,000. The institution is focused, instead, on promoting biking and transit for its faculty and staff.

In addition to the high cost, at a land-constrained campus, preserving space for parking means less space to advance learning, like additional research and instruction facilities.

Right now, as schools struggle with declining public funding, more colleges and universities than ever are embracing the cost-saving approach of TDM. The times simply demand innovation, says Tumlin.

“Particularly now that resources are scarcer, it’s forcing universities to sharpen their pencils,” he said. “The evidence is so overwhelming that it doesn’t make sense to just throw capital money at our problems to make them go away.”

What separates colleges that succeed at reducing costs from those that continue to throw away money on parking? One important factor, says Tumlin, is simply the presence of someone on staff with the technical expertise to rigorously compare investing in capital — like parking garages — with investing in programs — like variable parking rates.

Hagan is nearing the end of his second term as alderman for Ward VI. He has been employed in public service within Jackson County since 1998, beginning with the Ocean Springs Police Department and most recently as a Building Official for the City of Moss Point.

He holds an Associate's degree in Criminal Justice and is scheduled to earn his Bachelor's degree in August. He and his wife, Kim, are the parent of three children. Kim is an assistant teacher at Ocean Springs High School, working with special needs children.

"Ward 6 is the largest and fastest growing ward in Ocean Springs," Hagan said. "It is extremely important that this growth be controlled so that our way of life is not negatively affected. One of the largest issues facing our ward has been the overwhelming desire and push to build large multifamily apartment complexes. Fortunately we have been able to limit these large complexes which would be a drain on our city services as well as our school system, and not to mention the change in dynamics to the adjoining neighborhoods."

East is a graduate of Pascagoula High School and earned a degree in Education from Mississippi State University and a Master of Divinity from the Memphis Theological Seminary in Memphis, Tenn.

He is a retired United Methodist minister, having served as pastor for several churches in Mississippi. He led the building committee during construction of the East Campus of St. Paul United Methodist Church on U.S. 90. He served on the Mississippi Home Corporation Board, the Federal Home Loan Bank Advisory Board in Dallas, representing Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana, and was elected to various boards and agencies of the United Methodist Church.

"My life of service to people with various needs has created a skill set including building consensus, mediation, problem solving, listening and most importantly focusing like a laser on important issues. This opportunity to be an Alderman will allow me to "Give back" in a direct manner rather than just being a bystander to the day to day process."