+
From: John Young <jya@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
+
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 1995 16:07:05 -0400
The Wall Street Journal, September 26, 1995
Princeton's Newest Dormitory Could Put It in the RV League
By June Fletcher
When F. Scott Fitzgerald attended Princeton University, he
lived in romantic neo-Gothic dormitories with stone
stairwells, tall arches, spires and gargoyles.
Current Princeton sophomore Leslie Sterling, 19 years old,
lives in a yellow mobile home parked on an old soccer
field. "We make jokes about tornadoes," she says.
No ivy grows on the walls of the trailer, one of 10
identical "prefabricated modular units" that are housing an
overflow of students. The university has rented the units
for a year from After Disaster, in West Windsor, N.J. The
"disaster" at Princeton: More students than expected took
up its offer of admission this year.
It's the first time Princeton has used such units to ease
a housing shortage says associate provost Georgia Nugent,
"though once we had to house a surplus of graduate students
in a Holiday Inn." This summer, the university wrote to
students going into their sophomore year, asking for
volunteers. "We didn't want to force anyone into them,"
says university spokeswoman Jackie Savani.
Princeton isn't the only exclusive university to turn to
trailers. At Stanford University, near Palo Alto, Calif.,
some 270 double-wide trailers have housed students since
1968. Keith Guy, director of housing and dining services,
says the mobile homes are being phased out as new dorms are
built, and currently are used only for graduate students.
In expensive, suburban Princeton, mobile homes are still a
novelty. But even though a trailer doesn't have the
ambiance of a traditional dorm room, it does offer more
convenience. Students in most of Princeton's traditional
dorms share musty showers with students on several floors,
eat in vast dining halls and can't have hot plates or
microwaves in their rooms. But each group of four
sophomores in a mobile home has two bedrooms, a small,
furnished living room, a kitchenette and a full bath. The
units are wired to accept computers.
"Everything is new, and we have so much space," says Ms.
Sterling of Lake Forest, Ill.
And to ease the stigma of living in an Ivy League trailer
park, the university offered each student who chose the
trailers $1,000 off the $2,790 annual housing fees. "AII my
friends are jealous," Ms. Sterling says.
[End]
-----
The Wall Street Journal, September 26, 1995
Do Our Cities Have a Parking Shortage? Drivers Say Yes;
Experts Say No
By Heidi Evans
Ken Eisner was fed up with trying to park in downtown
Pittsburgh, so he did what he had to do: He joined an
Orthodox Jewish synagogue.
The $150 annual membership includes a parking space just a
short walk to his law firm, and a far cry from the $2,340
a year he would have to pay for a spot in his office
building's garage.
"The only hitch," says Mr. Eisner. who is not Orthodox, "is
that they need 10 men to have a service, and if they're
short worshipers and see my car, they call me."
For drivers in cities across the country, aggravation over
parking has never seemed higher. The usual agitation about
urban parking has intensified in recent years as cities
remove curbside spaces to speed up traffic flow and
accommodate more cars. Today, there are 189 million
passenger cars and trucks in circulation at any given time
and 105.2 million controlled (nonprivate) parking spaces.
The average car is parked 95% of the time.
Despite the widespread conviction that there are acute
parking shortages not just in New York, but in San
Francisco, Boston, Washington, Pittsburgh and Chicago, some
urban planners and parking experts say there is actually no
parking shortage at all. They argue that there is plenty of
parking -- if you are willing to pay or walk -- two
activities that are anathema to American motorists.
"People want to be able to park within 17 feet of their
destination, and are frequently unwilling to either pay for
the privilege or use a free, vacant space several blocks
away," says Marie Witmer, editor of the Parking
Professional, a trade magazine for operators of private and
municipal parking. "It's not that there is a shortage of
spaces, just a shortage of free spaces where people want
them to be."
Tell that to Amanda Everett, a flight attendant who moved
to Boston this year with her 1995 silver Maxima. Ecstatic
that she found what appeared to be a legal spot in front of
her apartment building, she awoke one morning to find a $40
orange summons flapping on the windshield. Convinced the
police had made a mistake -- a no-parking sign was facing
the other way -- she left her car there. The next day,
there was another $40 ticket. The third day, her car was
towed.
"Everyone back home warned me about bringing the car to
Boston, but I said, 'I just bought it. I'll find a place to
park,' " says Ms. Everett, as she waited at Boston City
Hall to protest $140 in parking fines.
Ms. Everett sent her car back home to North Carolina in
June with just 7,000 miles on it and told her family to
sell it. "It's too much stress having a car here," she
says. "I've had it."
In San Francisco, where the streets are packed with cars of
apartment dwellers and tourists, Russell Frank rarely moved
his Toyota for fear of giving up a coveted spot. In one of
the nation's most exciting cities for night life, he stayed
home.
"It got to the point where a friend would call and say,
'Let's go listen to some jazz,' and I wouldn't go," says
Mr. Frank, a folklore professor who has since moved to the
country. "My life started to get dominated by whether my
car was in a good spot or not."
Hank Dittmar says he gave up hunting for a parking spot in
his San Francisco neighborhood to hunt for an available
garage space. (It took him three years to land one.) But
one weekend, friends of Mr. Dittmar's drove their van up
from Los Angeles to see him. Mr. Dittmar woke to find a
note on his kitchen table: "Dear Hank: We went to dinner
last night, couldn't find a place to park afterward, so we
drove to Las Vegas. It was easier."
"I swear there are 200,000 less parking spaces than
people," Mr. Dittmar fumes.
Americans like Mr. Dittmar are living in a dream world if
they don't surrender the long-held notion that there should
be free parking for everyone, says Ms. Witmer, the parking
editor. "Free parking spaces are going the way of the dodo
bird -- extinct," she says. "Even now as the shopping
centers are gearing up and building lots, they are charging
for parklng. Eventually everyone will pay, no matter what."
Donald Shoup, an urban-planning professor and "parking
philosopher" at the University of California in Los
Angeles, says the cities have created their own traffic
nightmares. If cities charged market price for what is now
free on-street parking, he reasons, the demand for parking
would decrease, and no one would think there was a parking
shortage anymore.
"If we gave away chairs for free, we would have a chair
problem," he says. "Right now, since so much curbside
parking is free, people would rather cruise than pay. And
the government gives us a financial incentive to do so."
Prof. Shoup's solution? Charge money to park on residential
streets. To make this politically palatable, the money
could go to improve the street where it's collected. In
essence, Mr. Shoup proposes a "Parking Benefit District"
akin to the Business Improvement Districts that have
sprouted in many American cities. The money would be spent
on sidewalk or street repairs, tree planting or the hiring
of a security guard for the block.
The result, Mr. Shoup suggests, is that parking spaces
would always be available in these areas, assuming cities
charged the right price.
While residents of some other cities are seriously annoyed
about parking, New Yorkers are beyond discouraged. Many of
them get up four mornings a week at 7:30 to move or double
park their cars in accordance with the city's Byzantine
parking regulations.
Some New Yorkers now beg auto- and glass-repair shops to
hold on to their cars for days after they have been fixed.
Having a car in the shop is not only legal parking but also
a protective maneuver: Motorists don't have to worry about
whether their cars will survive the night with their
radios, air bags, locks, windows, ignitions and batteries
intact.
"I feel for you people who have to park on the street, but
I'm not a parking garage, I'm a repair shop," Gary Garr,
owner of Marmin Collision Corp., recently told a customer
who wouldn't pick up her car.
In Chicago, known for its aggressive parking enforcement,
the city will boot or tow a car with five unpaid tickets.
Last year, Chicago generated $75 million in revenue from
parking fines. Michael Freedberg says if he isn't home by
10 p.m., there is no chance of finding a spot on his
tree-lined street. So he illegally parks in his next-door
neighbor's driveway rather than risk a six-block walk late
at night near lake Michigan.
"I usually get an irate note threatening me with the police
or having me towed," says Mr. Freedberg, whose neighbor is
the Unification Church. Would he consider joining the
church for his Toyota?
"I'm prepared to go to some lengths for a parking spot,"
Mr. Freedberg says, "but not that far."
[Sidebar]
Finding a Spot
Six of the largest ticket-writing cities in America and the
money they collect:
____________________________________________________
No. of
Tickets Revenue
City (millions) (millions)
____________________________________________________
Boston 1.7 $47
Chicago 3.5 75
Los Angeles 2.7 80
New York 9.9 306
San Francisco 2.2 47
Washington D.C. 1.4 48
____________________________________________________
[End]