Flexible permits and strategic planning ease parking woes at UC Davis.
By Perry H. Eggleston and Ramon G. Zavala
At the University of California (UC) Davis, we are best known for our cultural commitment to the bicycle, which began when the university’s second chancellor instructed his planners to design a “bicycle-riding, tree-lined campus.” Today, our campus roads are lined with massive oak trees, and successive campus leaders have prioritized limiting road use to bicycles and campus vehicles, creating a bike culture at UC Davis that is admired nationwide.
Our city of Davis, California, is quite the model of excellent transportation as well. It’s the home of the first bike lane — installed in 1967 and technically a Class IV Protected Bikeway by modern California definitions — and the U.S. Bicycling Hall of Fame. Moreover, the city intentionally limits the width of traffic lanes in town to 10.5 feet because narrow lanes result in slower speeds, and people feel more comfortable biking around slower vehicles.
One would assume that with all this great bicycle culture and infrastructure, there would be little need for a driving commute and the accompanying parking system couldn’t possibly be stressed by demand. However, before the COVID-19 pandemic, massive lines of people stretched outside of the UC Davis Transportation Services office to buy new hangtag permits. Moreover, for about 4 months out of the academic year, we were valet stack-parking the overflowing numbers of commuter vehicles in our parking lots and structures. What in the world was going on?
Unpacking the parking puzzle
As a system, UC Davis’ parking practices had been the same for years. We sold unlimited, non-zoned, long-term parking permits to campus affiliates — that is, students and employees — by the month, quarter, or year. There was no plan to integrate virtual permitting. The only easily obtainable daily permits were priced for visitors, which meant that any affiliate would have been better off buying a monthly permit than 5 daily permits in a month. That used to work. What changed?
We set out to get answers as part of a planning project that would be later named “Transportation Tomorrow.” Here’s what we learned:
• Staying small. The city of Davis is intentionally limiting its growth to the current city boundary and focusing on housing infill and densification,
a much more complex way of increasing housing units.
• Retiring in place. Davis is so idyllic that those who retire from the university tend to stay in town instead of moving elsewhere, thereby reducing expected housing vacancies.
• No inventory. There are precious few buyable homes. Zillow shows that slightly more than 300 single-family homes in Davis changed hands in the last 12 months and that those homes are comparably expensive for the region.
• Next door is more than 10 miles away. Although Davis’ small footprint keeps biking and transit a reasonable option for any in-town trip, the nearest towns with more affordable housing are 10 to 20 miles away, and precious few transit options exist to traverse the intervening agricultural areas and wetlands.
For these reasons, our newer employees are much more likely to live outside of Davis, where the only reasonable commute option involves a personal vehicle.
Inverting the parking paradigm
So, what’s to be done? Our planning project came up with 10 suggestions:
1. Create an integrated transportation platform.
2. Transition from discounted bulk parking to daily decision parking.
3. Incentivize preferred transportation modes.
4. Expand shared rides programs.
5. Enhance local and regional transit.
6. Strengthen active transportation programs.
7. Leverage emerging mobility services.
8. Improve community engagement.
9. Use policy as a tool to shift culture, particularly for telework.
10. Improve the campus transportation network.
The report was finalized and published in June 2019, just as we began searching for a new leader for Transportation Services. Our new department head started on January 2, 2020, and he was tasked with operationalizing these 10 suggestions. Of course, 2020 would turn out to be significantly more complex than anyone imagined.
Nothing could prepare any leader for what occurred in March 2020 and the sudden campus closures in response to the pandemic. However, like most campuses, UC Davis charged forward, adjusted campus operations, and embraced the remote/hybrid workplace — coincidentally fulfilling suggestion number 9.
The change would enable the introduction of the daily choice permit model and complete elimination of the long-term “set-it-and-forget-it” annual permits, fulfilling suggestion number 2. The daily choice approach enables students and employees to pay for their parking each day. This provided campus commuters with much-needed flexibility in uncertain times, enabling them to change their commute mode any day according to their needs.
We marketed this change as “inverting the campus parking paradigm,” because the prior system of long-term parking permits actively encouraged the commuter to drive and helped to stifle the adoption of more sustainable commuting practices. However, with the daily choice model, we don’t have to beg people to give up their annual permit. Instead, we just point to the highly visible price of parking and say: “If you don’t park, you don’t pay. Spend your parking fee on a bus fare and enjoy a less stressful commute.”
From overflow to optimization
Daily choice parking has also helped eliminate a major expense. Before 2020, UC Davis had been issuing 2 free “perk” parking days per month to commuters who forfeited their eligibility to purchase a long-term permit. This perk was highly valued by our campus community of students and employees, nearly 70% of whom commute to campus without a vehicle.
However, a flaw existed: The program allowed participants to “bank” these free parking days, as there was only an annual expiration date. As a result, during the cold and rainy winter months, campus parking lots overflowed with these perk permit holders, forcing Transportation Services to spend an additional $800,000 annually for attendants to provide assisted valet services to stack park vehicles.
The daily choice permit approach helped eliminate this expense in two different ways. First, it made the cost of a single day of parking much more reasonable — $3 as compared to a $10 visitor pass. This change enabled us to cancel the perk passes altogether and generate revenue from those parkers.
Second, we saw the deterrent effect of price take hold. People do not hesitate to use free parking, but if they have to pay something, they will ration those funds and often choose not to park. With our long-term commitment to telework combined with the deterrent effect of price, we were able to end our valet stack-parking contract.
Balancing growth and parking demand
As more students are admitted, more employees are brought onboard to support those students, and the campus is in the process of canceling leases for off-campus offices and brings workers back to the campus, parking demand will continue to increase to and potentially exceed pre-2020 levels.
By adopting daily choice permits and committing to facilitating remote, hybrid, and compressed work arrangements, UC Davis’ Transportation Services can allocate and price its present parking inventory to ensure the highest utilization before resorting to the expensive process of increasing
parking inventory.
PERRY H. EGGLESTON, DPA, CAPP, is the executive director of UC Davis Transportation Services. He can be reached at pheggleston@ucdavis.edu.
RAMON ZAVALA is the transportation demand manager for UC Davis Transportation Services. He can be reached at rgzavala@ucdavis.edu.
