Dartblog

Beyond my thoughts of the other day, a couple of deeply flawed ideas about parking have been floating around campus for a while. Let’s look at them:

Bad Idea One: Close the Central Campus Parking Lots: Let’s face it, parking lots are ugly. If you’ve ever been to Cambridge University, the glorious expanses of greensward make it a far more attractive place than car-filled Oxford. Should we do the same at Dartmouth by eradicating the parking areas around our academic buildings?

If your concern is solely aesthetic, you would be in favor of this idea. But, and there is always a but when we are talking about the real world, there are other considerations in play here. If we were to oblige everyone employed by the College to park in satellite lots, we would slightly inconvenience maintenance workers and administrators. They have no choice but to travel to their place of work, where they spend the entire day.

However, members of the faculty do have a choice: technology allows them to stay at home and do research almost without impediment. The can easily limit themselves to coming into Hanover two or three times per week to teach (in the two quarters each year when they do teach); otherwise they can avoid the campus. The cost to the College of a stay-at-home faculty, a cost that we are already partially paying in the current egalitarian mess, would be huge.

Taken to its logical extreme, if we go this enviro/aesthetic route and dispense with central lots, we could probably do away with most faculty offices, too — because professors’ offices in departments won’t get much use.

Bad Idea Two: Try a Free Market System: Whenever I hear of a market-based solution in an academic setting, I reach for my revolver. You know then that you are well into the land of half-comprehended assumptions.

One proposal being batted around involves charging a progressive rate for close-in parking spaces: the closer that you want to be to the heart of campus, the more you pay. In this way, the people who really value proximity to their place of work will fork out the necessary dough to park in close.

If you are trying to distribute a scarce good to an undifferentiated mass of consumers, this is a pretty good way to arrange things. You could go further: auction the best spaces to the highest bidders and maximize your income — if that is your primary goal. If so, you should open the auction up to students as well. I am sure that there are many well-off parents who would be happy to pay handsomely for a dorm-side parking space for their offspring.

But if you step back and reflect for a moment, you have to realize that both of these ideas are unsound. Why? Because Dartmouth College’s primary mission is neither campus aesthetics nor revenue maximization.

For those of you who have forgotten, education is what we are after in these precincts. The aesthetic and monetary cost of giving the faculty priority access to their classrooms and offices would be minimal, and the educational return to our students and to the overall life of the institution would be high.

Folks, this is not a hard decision.