AU’s draft Campus Plan calls for additional parking at the proposed East Campus and the Tenley Campus, even though parking use is decreasing at a rate of 3.1 percent per year.
Only 53 percent of spots were occupied on a typical fall 2010 weekday, according to a report by Gorove/Slade Transportation Planners and Engineers, a firm contracted by AU to conduct the study.
The draft plan calls for a 300-space underground parking garage on East Campus, where there are currently 900 spots on the Nebraska Parking Lot, and 400 to 500 spots at the Tenley Campus to accommodate the proposed move of the Washington College of Law to that location. There are no plans to decrease the cost of parking.
Although some surface parking lots would be removed, the spots will be “sufficient to handle future demand,” according to the report. No new surface lots will be added.
AU currently has 2,724 parking spaces spread over underground garages and surface lots.
“[A goal of the Campus Plan] is to hold the parking inventory constant,” said Jorge Abud, AU’s assistant vice president for Facilities Development and Real Estate. “Over time, we will do away with surface parking. It is a transition period.”
The goal of parking costs are, according to the plan are “[to be] high enough to significantly deter driving alone to campus, while not hurting the campus in the marketplace for faculty and staff, or generating a higher amount of off-campus and on-street parking.”
“All university charges are market-based,” Abud said. “For parking, we look at commercial and apartment [costs] and charge comparable rates.”
Since 1995, shuttle ridership has increased. The plan says while there are “no major areas of concern” for the shuttle system, route and stop improvements could be made.
But Alef Worku, AU’s manager of Transportation Operations and Maintenance, does not think the Campus Plan will affect current major shuttle routes.
Since AU owns the building that houses the Washington College of Law, the University will still use it in some capacity and shuttles will continue to stop there, according to Chief of Staff David Taylor. Officials are not sure yet what that capacity will be.
“There's always room for improvement, to be more efficient and cost-effective,” Worku said, adding that a GPS system to track the fleet’s movements on a website was installed last semester.
Additional transportation changes in the Campus Plan should be “relatively minor,” according to the report, with a focus on improving walking areas for pedestrians and reducing vehicle circulation on campus.
The main campus road will move to the back of Leonard Hall.
“We want to get traffic away from where the most pedestrians are,” Abud said. “Little by little, we’ve slowed the traffic from the heart of campus.”
AU hopes to improve management of transportation demand, improve roadway conditions and work with D.C. officials to find a solution for Ward Circle, which has been the scene of 80 accidents between 2007 and 2009, nearly as much as all the other AU campus intersections combined, according to the report.
Scott Marturano contributed to this report.
kfroehlich@theeagleonline.com
