Transportation And Sustainable Campus Communities – New book profiles college towns, examining what’s working and what isn’t.

Cars, colleges and communities

"Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone/They paved paradise and put up a parking lot." So sang Joni Mitchell sang in her classic hit "Big Yellow Taxi."

By JOSEPH THOMAS Colorado Daily Staff

http://www.coloradodaily.com/articles/2004/05/26/news/news05.txt

But Boulder Mayor Will Toor and University of Colorado Professor and former Boulder city councilman Spense Havlick know what they’ve got in their new book "Transportation and Sustainable Campus Communities": a story of how college towns throughout the world deal with cars.

Havlick, who spent two decades on the Boulder City Council, and Toor, who works at CU in addition to serving as mayor, combined their expertise and strong interest in transportation issues and came to a conclusion that delighted both: CU-Boulder is one of the top campus community models in the world for reduction in automobile use.

The new book, which profiles 10 campus communities including CU-Boulder, analyzes current trends in transportation and looks at strategies that have been tried by other communities coping with traffic, parking and transit development.

The book argues that cars are "the dominant mode of travel in the United States, with more than 95 percent of personal trips taking place by car," and car usage is growing. This sets up the problem of transportation – namely traffic congestion and parking – among the various environmental and economic impacts college towns struggle to manage.

Out of the hundreds of communities housing universities that Toor and Havlick used to gather information for their book, only two did not have a problem with transportation and parking.

At Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Ore., incentives are given to those who leave their cars behind, Havlick said. The college earmarks houses around the campus at which people buying or leasing the houses must agree not to bring a car.

At Stanford, the university pays students not to bring cars with them, according to Havlick.

There are economic incentives for institutions to provide alternative transportation. According to the book, there is very little cheap land available for parking lots around universities.

It costs between $20,000 and $30,000 to build a single parking spot in a parking lot, said Toor, costs that are prohibitive to building them.

"It is three times cheaper for the university to move someone out of a parking space and onto the bus than it would be to build a parking space (for their car)," Toor said.

As outlined in the book, bicycles should be taken seriously as an alternative form of transportation as opposed to cars. Bicycles are more environmentally friendly, more convienent (with proper infrastructure) and relatively inexpensive.

On May 27, 2004, Toor and Havlick will present their book at 7:30 p.m. at the Boulder Book Store as part of the 2004 Boulder Book Store Reading Series.

The introduction of the book can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.islandpress.org/.