The solution to parking and traffic problems on campus is not to add more parking lots, but to reduce the number of cars on campus and make it easier for people to get around without a vehicle.
Our campus is designed for and dominated by cars. Roads snake through most of our campus, connecting the many parking lots that hold the thousands of cars on campus.
UCA even included your parking permit in your tuition and fees whether or not you like it, almost like you’re expected to have a vehicle if you’re a UCA student — a very expensive expectation.
Gas prices are soaring right now, and according to the Housing and Transportation Affordability Index, it costs an average of $10,535 to own an automobile in Conway, Arkansas. Compare that with the measly $4,132 UCA budgets for transportation in its students’ cost of attendance.
Not all of us have parents who can subsidize the remaining $6,403.
UCA’s dedication to creating a community centered on cars as the primary form of transportation comes at the detriment of our wallets, but also our safety.
Cars are one of the most dangerous forms of transportation. A driver has already struck one student this semester at a crosswalk and in 2020 a UCA student hit and killed another student with their car in the HPER parking lot.
As the campus has expanded, it has also sprawled to accommodate gravel and paved lots, making the campus harder for pedestrians and cyclists to navigate safely. Parking lots take up a huge amount of space, and building them only incites more people to come to campus with a car.
The roads next to the future Short and Denney lot are some of the quietest and safest-feeling roads on campus for pedestrians, but who knows how much more congestion the 71 new spots will bring, and how many more interactions between pedestrians and automobiles there will be.
While much of the car-centricity of UCA can’t be undone quickly, there are steps we could take to shift the balance and make our campus more of a place for people that accommodates cars, rather than a place for cars that accommodates people.
Right now UCA doesn’t do much to encourage alternate means of transportation. While some places around campus are great to stroll around, walking from the Student Health Center to Stanley Russ Hall is brutal, especially in the heat. While switching from one side of the road to another to follow the sidewalk, there are few trees offering shade, and your view is mostly concrete and cars.
Painting some actual bike lanes on the roads or making separate bike paths could encourage people to cycle around, reducing the number of cars, too.
The HPER has bikes you can rent, and it would be cool if they had even more available. There used to be a bike-sharing program on campus, which is something real-deal universities have had for years now.
Making campus more accessible for cyclists to leave and enter would make it much easier for off-campus students who live nearby to travel onto campus without a car, but it could help long-distance commuters, too.
Imagine parking your car when you get to campus and hopping on a bike to get wherever you need to go between classes, rather than driving from place to place all day.
There are less expensive and far less ugly ways to accommodate students traveling to and around campus than adding even more lanes, asphalt or gravel, and we should challenge the city and UCA’s administration to think outside the box when building infrastructure around and on our campus.