MODERN TIMES
Art Hobson
ahobson@uark.edu
NWA Times 12 April
2008
Restrict high
school and college student parking
In
a wonderful local sustainability initiative, "green teams" are
forming at all Fayetteville schools.
These student-driven teams include faculty members and look for ways for
their schools to be more environmentally friendly, while instilling in
students, staff, and faculty an environmental consciousness that can last a
lifetime. Suggestions for green
team action include turning off the lights when the last person leaves a room,
turning thermostats up in the summer and down in the winter, using
energy-efficient compact fluorescent lights, recycling, and turning computers
off when they aren't being used.
I'd like to add an item to the list.
The
Union of Concerned Scientists, an excellent pro-environment organization, has
published a useful book called The Consumer's Guide to Effective
Environmental Choices. The book lists the many ways we all
impact the environment, singles out a few as especially damaging, and describes
ways to reduce our more damaging impacts.
The book's choice as the most damaging American consumer behavior is the
personal use of cars and light trucks.
The chances are that nothing else you do hits the environment with
anything like the impact of your driving.
The
impacts include pollution from carbon monoxide, from oxides of nitrogen, from
unburned hydrocarbons and, most importantly, from the many tons of
planet-killing carbon dioxide emitted by every car annually. It includes automobile deaths and
injuries which strike especially at the young. It includes the million mammals, birds, reptiles, and
amphibians killed every day on America's highways; that's about ten every
second. It includes the tremendous
drain of automobiles on the planet's natural resources. And it includes the environmental and
human effects of the Iraq War, a war that was launched primarily to ensure
America's access to mideast oil.
If
the green teams want to make a big impact on Fayetteville's environmental
habits, they should consider ways to reduce automobile use. There are many opportunities: Students who live close to school
should walk or bicycle to school, those who live further should use the
bus. Parents should be discouraged
from driving their children to school.
Those who, despite the green teams' best efforts, do drive their kids to
school should carpool. Students
should be discouraged from driving to school.
High
school green teams could perform a huge service to the environment and to
Fayetteville by encouraging a restrictive student parking policy. Most U.S. high schools have
restrictions on student parking; Fayetteville allows only juniors and senior to
purchase parking permits. Driving
to high school should be regarded as a privilege, not a right. I don't see any real reason why any
high school students should be driving to school, or why high schools should
spend millions of dollars on student parking lots. At a mere $40 per year for student parking spaces, Fayetteville
High School gives nearly free parking to students--a great inducement to drive
to school. The cost of parking in
the university's new Harmon Parking Garage provides a more realistic, although
still highly subsidized, figure:
$563 for a year-long parking permit. If the high school is going to give student parking spaces
away at bargain-basement prices, the school surely has the right and indeed the
obligation to regulate student parking by for instance restricting it to
seniors who are in good academic standing.
Ironically,
those who support building a humongous 3000-student high school out beyond
I-540 next door to Tontitown and Johnson give student parking as one reason for
the new location. It seems to me
that driving mania has come to a sad pass in America when we choose to build
our schools on the far fringes of our towns just so students will be able to
drive to school. Are we to let
everything be dictated by the so-called "need" to drive? Surely a more reasonable approach to
the perceived parking shortage around the present school is to restrict student
parking.
Similar
principles apply to university students.
Although we don't have green teams at the University of Arkansas, we
have an applied sustainability center, a sustainability coordinator, several
environmentally-oriented student groups, and plenty of students and faculty who
care about the planet. All of
these should urge the university to adopt restrictive student campus parking
policies. Many U.S. colleges
restrict student driving by prohibiting some or all undergraduates from parking
on campus. Typically, student cars
are stored in a distant off-campus lot until needed for out-of-town
travel.
Such
a policy encourages young people to develop car-free habits, encourages alternative
transportation (walking, bicycles, mass transit), encourages housing and
economic development near college campuses, saves money and space that would
have been devoted to on-campus parking, and reduces all the harmful
environmental effects of the automobile.
It would solve the problem of student drinking and driving. And central Fayetteville would get a
rejuvenating boost from student business.
In a reversal of the gutting of our city when the Northwest Arkansas
Mall opened many years ago, businesses would return to the area near the square
and downtown residents would no longer have to drive to the mall to buy
ordinary items such as clothes and hardware.
With the help of green teams and others, we can make Fayetteville more sustainable, safer, and (to quote our city's Downtown Master Plan) "superbly walkable"; we can have a great and bustling downtown, save millions of dollars, solve many of the city's parking problems, promote good health through walking, reduce pollution, and save lives and injuries, all in one fell swoop. How? By restricting student parking on the high school and university campuses.