With the beginning of the school year comes the routine expenditures for books, school supplies and other necessary items for survival throughout the year. For many students, parking is one of those necessary expenses commonly attacked for being too expensive.
At Loyola, resident students pay a hefty $400 a year for the privilege of parking on campus, while commuter students shell out $340 for that same privilege with some added restrictions on when and where they can park. For many students, the cost of a parking decal in conjunction with the idea of paying for parking makes the price seem ridiculously high, especially considering the cost of attending the university.
Despite this, can we really claim that high parking prices are highway robbery?
Higher parking prices provide several benefits. First, common sense dictates that higher prices generally discourage increased consumption of a product (except in the curious case of Veblen goods), the product in this case being parking. By increasing prices, the number of cars parked on campus should theoretically decrease. Assuming that a decrease in parking decals purchased does not coincide with a decrease in enrollment, this would mean that more students chose to not have cars on campus.
The campus community and the community at large benefit from this in several ways. Despite the fact that most of the university’s vehicular traffic is confined to the periphery of campus, cars on campus still pose a threat to pedestrians who share some of the roadways (who would have thought that the obnoxiously slow speed limits on campus served a purpose other than to annoy students).
The fewer cars, the less likely an accident is to happen. If fewer cars are present on campus, the university also reduces the amount of traffic it contributes to the roads of New Orleans. A common solution to high traffic levels on a given road is to tear up the road and make it larger to accommodate larger amounts of traffic. What happens, however, is that larger roads not only accommodate higher volumes of traffic, but also facilitate and encourage more usage, which leads to inevitable headaches on the part of drivers in the form of increased traffic (notice the cycle?).
We should not encourage more people to drive by making streets more accessible for cars, but rather, we should discourage people from driving by making streets more inaccessible for cars and more accessible for pedestrians and public transportation.
True public space that facilitates interactions between people is necessary for community. We should not be as concerned with getting from point A to point B as quickly as possible as much as we should be concerned with the experience of getting from place to place.
Two people sitting in separate cars on their way to work cannot have the same rich interaction that two people sitting next to each other on the bus or walking down the street can.
After considering all the headaches and disadvantages of driving, is it really that much of a shame that parking is so expensive, or should we rather consider it as a step in the right direction to discourage further automobile usage?
Garrett Fontenot can be reached at
