After years of enjoying relatively free rein to drive and park their convenient two-wheelers around the campus, scooter drivers are now facing an unpleasant choice: pay the $109 parking fee imposed this year by the Department of Transportation Services, or ditch the scooter.
DOTS officials said they mandated the new fee this year — the first time scooter riders have ever had to pay for registration — to cover expenses for their new crackdown on unlawfully parked scooters and updated parking infrastructure. And while we acknowledge the importance of such changes, we have to ask whether this fee hike will fix the problem or just create new ones.
Updated policies and improved scooter accommodations are certainly needed on this campus — especially additional parking spaces — as the number of scooter drivers has increased greatly over the last few years. Improvements do cost money, and given the fact that DOTS is self-sufficient and does not receive funding from the university, it needs to look for additional sources of revenue to make these expansions happen. But this fee is a misguided solution that has already elicited an outcry from riders who can’t afford the high price tag and would rather park off campus than pay for registration.
According to DOTS officials, revenue from this new fee will be used to pay for those investments they made over the summer. We now wonder whether that cash was spent as fairly and efficiently as it could have been.
Though DOTS is installing several concrete parking pads for scooters, most of the other expenses are geared toward penalizing scooter drivers who park illegally, rather than focusing on providing even more parking options in better locations.
In addition to purchasing a golf cart-like vehicle used solely to enforce scooter parking, DOTS also bought 37 wheel boots to attach onto illegally-parked scooters.The fee will also fund a departmental shift that designates two DOTS employees solely for scooter enforcement. Students have called the fee a blatant cash cow, and while that may be true, the money is already spent — we’re more concerned that DOTS officials haven’t exactly thought this one through.
As a pilot program last summer, university officials closed Campus Drive to most private vehicles in an effort to make the campus more pedestrian-friendly and reduce the number of vehicles clogging its roads. Although officials ultimately decided to scrap the plan, most still supported the goal of reducing on-campus traffic. Who wouldn’t want to reduce the stop-and-go traffic that makes navigating the streets a nightmare for both drivers and pedestrians?
Although the Campus Drive closure never came to fruition, scooters are one way to unclog the streets. While they aren’t always an ideal means of transportation — proved by several on-campus scooter accidents last year — they do contribute to combating pollution and traffic when students drive them instead of cars.
DOTS officials clearly haven’t abandoned their focus on sustainable transportation solutions. They offer reduced-rate parking registrations to students bringing electric cars (50 percent discount) and low-emissions vehicles (20 percent discount), and additional incentives for carpooling and other forms of eco-friendly transit.
Springing such a steep parking fee on students creates a powerful disincentive for choosing to drive scooters on the campus, which most probably do for a variety of reasons. Maybe it’s laziness, maybe it’s an injury, maybe it’s having only short breaks between far-apart classes — but, basically, many students simply don’t want to walk. That’s not going to change just because the scooter policy does — now they’ll just bring cars. It’s worrisome that the department seemed oblivious of the likely correlation between this policy and their other priorities.
Campus Drive still remains open and the university still hasn’t found a solution to the traffic congestion on the campus — this new scooter policy will likely only make it worse.
