There is a spoken and unspoken hierarchy and tenure that go into parking assignments on university campuses, and decisions about who parks where can be challenging. The tough question is, who should be making these decisions?
At Penn State’s University Park campus, individual departments decide who parks where, using a system of volunteer parking chairs. These are faculty and staff members who agree to allocate parking assignments within their own departments; the parking department assigns a number of spaces to each, and the parking chairs decide who gets what. The system works both with regular parking issues and also when parking is reduced due to construction or other reasons, and is instrumental to the way parking professionals on campus do their jobs.
In this month’s Parking & Mobility magazine, Ryan Givens, CAPP, associate director of transportation services at Penn State; and David Dorman, CAPP, parking allocation manager, explain the university’s parking chair system and why it might work for other campuses. Fascinating! Read it here.