How Campus Growth Affects Parking at Universities
What comes to mind when thinking about college campuses? Lecture halls, dormitories, architecture, green grass malls, stadiums, and arenas are just a few things most people imagine. Parking lots, garages, permit zones, and parking citation enforcement aren’t often the first things one associates with the college experience, but schools today must prioritize them. Too often, parking solutions get pushed aside.
Parking is part of the daily grind for on-campus residents, faculty, staff, and commuters. Due to the expansion of smaller campuses into larger institutions, including satellite locations, parking has become a contentious topic for those who expect a greater experience from their school and employer. This blog post dives into the importance of parking on campus, reasons why it’s an important issue, and how to enhance the parker’s experience.
The Parking Demand
College and university enrollment continues to rise nationwide due to the ever-growing population and demand for educational degrees. In the fall semester of 2023, more than two-thirds of states in the US saw a 3.2% growth in undergraduate enrollment across public, private, and community colleges, according to National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reports. This growth has sparked campus parking departments to evolve with their school’s growing enrollments—not only in parking but also in housing and classrooms. Interestingly, the number of students living on campuses has not increased as exponentially as one might think.
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a steady rise in students choosing to commute to school rather than residing on campus. Take the University of Oklahoma, for example, which continues to experience students gravitating toward commuting to and from campus ever since in-person classes resumed. College and university parking and transportation departments at schools like Oklahoma must expand their parking availability to accommodate the needs of all students.
Parking is not a new idea or invention, but the amount of parking infrastructure required today isn’t comparable to that of a few decades ago. This ever-changing landscape of parking on campuses presents university parking professionals with a daunting task—finding space for parking lots and garages to accommodate campus growth. Lots and garages must be in areas easily accessible to lecture halls, dorms, and other well-traveled parts of campus.
If there isn’t enough parking in nearby areas, complaints and issues will arise, and student enrollment could subsequently suffer. While supplying enough parking for everyone moving throughout campus is the immediate challenge, an added layer of difficulty arises when addressing concerns about the integrity of campus aesthetics. Ensuring campuses resemble the image students, alumni, faculty, and others attribute to their university is as crucial as well-organized parking.
Parking Management Strategies for Navigating Campus Growth
The value of a parking space and a frictionless parking experience are meaningful and memorable to each student, staff member, and visitor, ultimately impacting the school’s overall reputation. As universities continue to experience enrollment growth, it is essential that parking management technologies—software, hardware, or a combination of both—are capable of scaling to keep up with parker populations and demands.
ADVANCE YOUR PARKING ENFORCEMENT AND MANAGEMENT TECHNOLOGIES
Parking enforcement is essential to ensure turnover and make spaces available for others. Real-time mobile parking enforcement software and robust backend parking management solutions are beneficial and necessary tools for departments to harness.
Growing campuses create more arduous work for parking enforcement officers and administrators. These parking management technologies create efficiencies and boost the morale of staff, who will feel more accomplished in their day. The latest innovative platforms make it easier to manage citation payments, processing, and collections, which generates revenue and funds for departments to expand parking facilities and address campus growth. Built-in analytics tools can provide insights into campus parking patterns, high usage times, and peak demand, allowing university parking departments to make a case for infrastructure expansion, new initiatives, and innovative policies.
With an advanced permit management software platform that can integrate with the university’s information system, the management and issuance of different permit types become much easier and more efficient for an expanding campus.
OFFER PARKERS MOBILE APPLICATION TECHNOLOGIES
On a crowded campus, self-service mobile applications for buying permits or paying parking fees and citations, for example, reduce an influx of in-office visits and keep traffic flowing through usually bottlenecked campus lots and garages. Some applications allow customers to reserve parking for exact times and dates on a one-time or recurring basis, which offers flexibility and reduced stress associated with finding a parking spot while maximizing space utilization and turnover. The availability and use of mobile applications often contribute to creating a positive university parking experience for all.
INVEST IN MODERN PARKING HARDWARE AND NEXT-GENERATION SOFTWARE
In planning for future campus growth, evaluating if your parking hardware will adapt and support your goals to achieve operational success is essential. Too often, parking equipment reaches a limit that makes it unstable, unreliable, and unable to keep up with the pace of innovation, security standards, or parker preferences.
Consider investing in new hardware accessible to all future parkers, including easy-to-use interfaces with multi-language functionality. In some cases, hardware can simply be retrofitted or upgraded with next-generation software that enhances parking experiences and creates excellent operational efficiencies.
Schools of the Future
As colleges and universities grow, schools must adapt and balance parking solutions with care for campus aesthetics. It will be interesting to see how institutions mitigate issues with even more growth in the years ahead. For now, the best preparation includes developing a forward-facing strategy for the future and adopting scalable parking software and technology. Parking becomes more accessible and more efficient with innovative and strategic software and technology. Stress-free campus parking imparts a solid first impression and sways students, staff members, or first-time visitors to have a positive overall impression of a burgeoning university.
T2 Systems helps schools be sure every parking experience is a positive one. Reach out and connect if you’re ready to make every trip a smooth journey for parking operations amid your growing campus community.
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