From the Washtenaw Voice comes this news, “WCC offers shuttle from Eastern to ease parking.” Here are the opening paragraphs:
In order to free up parking spots on campus for the Winter 2010 semester, Washtenaw Community College will rent the parking lot located across the street from Rynearson Stadium at Eastern Michigan University, at a cost of $100,050.
Just south of Huron River Drive on Hewitt, and a little over a mile from WCC, the lot will allow more than 1,000 drivers the opportunity to park quickly, and immediately be shuttled to the front of the WCC Student Center building.
Two free shuttle buses will transport students, faculty and staff from the Rynearson lot — and back — beginning at 6:45 a.m. until 6:15 p.m., Monday through Thursday, beginning Jan. 11. The college is working with a number of vendors to possibly have “beverages, coffee and hot drinks” available to participants, according to Vice President of Administration and Finance Steven Hardy.
I don’t have a lot to do with WCC, so I guess this is kind of a naive question: is parking there really that bad?
And I also don’t know how much it typically costs to rent a large parking lot, but $100K? Really? For space that EMU really wouldn’t be using otherwise?
Yes, the parking there is terrible. Yes 100,000K is reasonable. Sitedad… are you actually complaining about EMU generating income?
I am fortunate for every penny we bring in right now.
I don’t think Sitedad was objecting, just asking questions. A related question is why EMU can’t run a shuttle van between its outer parking lots and the academic buildings. The perception among students is that the distances are great and unsafe to walk at night. And given the bad signage on campus, often the unfilled parking lots are in unknown locations to most students who drive to campus.
We used to, nobody used it.
Plenty of people tried (this was referred to as Outer Space at the time). Buses quit running @6:00 p.m. so it didn’t do any of our evening commuter students any good. In *way* too many cases, there weren’t enough buses to handle the demand during peak times.
We’ll see if WCC students use this leased lot or not– I’m going to bet not, but I could be wrong. If I was a WCC student/faculty/staff, I think I’d be a little po-ed that they aren’t willing to use part of the lots across the street at the fitness center as overflow parking.
They are using all available space on their campus. All Fall Semester WCC faculty and staff have been parking at Rynearson and being bussed over. Having students park over there is the new thing for WI10
They did not provide enough parking at the fitness center and over sold the memberships to the public. According to my daughter, who is a member, the parking availability is very tight. It will be interesting to see what WCC does. Building parking structures is an expensive business, since they don’t capitalize very fast.
I’m a member of the fitness center too, actually– it’s too expensive, but it’s really nice. Anyway, I think it kind of depends on when you go, but when I’m there (early in the morning), there’s a fair amount of space. And I would think that in the middle of the day, when classes at WCC are in full-swing, there wouldn’t be as many people working out. I dunno though.
Plus they just built this big athletic field complex on the side of the building that faces St. Joe’s, and with that a large parking lot. Seems to me that WCC students/faculty could park there too.
I have to wonder…why does EMU not build multi floor structures like I see at other schools or even in downtown Ann Arbor?
This seems to make a lot of sense, given the large amount of commuter students we have who depend on driving.
I know…”the money, the economy…” will be the reply. But like a lot of things on campus, this issue was not tackled in the decades when there was not a budget crisis.