Determination of Faculty and Staff Parking Permit Prices on University Campuses

Rodrigo Garcia, University of Texas at El Paso

Abstract

University campuses are the origins and destinations of a variety of trips generated by faculty, staff, students, and visitors. The vast number of trips that are attracted to university campuses result in parking congestion issues. In order to manage campus parking demand, universities establish Transportation and Parking Offices (TPO). This research has developed a two-stage procedure that can be used by TPOs as a tool for determining faculty and staff parking permit prices on university campuses. The first stage of the procedure is the determination of a single campus-wide base price (which may be regarded as the reference price or typical price) for all the faculty and staff parking permits. To estimate the base price, a Faculty and Staff Base Price (FSBP) model has been developed using the demographic, campus characteristics and climate data from 213 university campuses across the United States. The FSBP model developed using the Tobit regression technique is a linear function of the city’s population, average Fall temperature, in-state tuition fee, employee number, and the campus population density. The FSBP model suggests a base price (in $ per year) that is benchmarked against the base prices at other university campuses. The suggested base price is used as an input to the second step in the procedure. The second stage of the procedure not only estimates different parking permit prices for faculty and staff at the different parking zones on campus, it also provides, for the same zone, different permit prices for faculty and staff. A methodology has been proposed that uses the concept of last-mile walking time, the value of time, as well as the median salaries of faculty and staff as inputs. This methodology first estimates the base prices of faculty and staff, respectively, based on the FSBP’s model estimate in stage 1, the number of faculty and staff employed on the campus and their median annual salaries. The concept of Value of Parking Access (VoPA, in $ per year) is introduced. The VoPA assumes that the sum of the price of a parking permit (the willingness to pay) and the Value of Walking Time (VoWT) is a constant value across all parking zones on a campus. The VoWT from a parking zone to a faculty or staff office may be estimated from the walking distance, the value of time that is related to the median salary and the number of on-campus working days in a year. The base prices are used to calibrate the VoPAs for faculty and staff, respectively. Knowing the faculty and staff’s VoPAs (which is a campus-wide constant) and VoWT for each zone, the permit prices for faculty and staff for the parking zone may be determined. The two-stage procedure has been applied to a case study that used The University of Texas at El Paso as the site. This two-step procedure not only provides a rational approach in the determination of parking permit prices, it also recommends different prices for faculty and staff for the same zone.

Subject Area

Transportation|Civil engineering

Recommended Citation

Garcia, Rodrigo, "Determination of Faculty and Staff Parking Permit Prices on University Campuses" (2021). ETD Collection for University of Texas, El Paso. AAI28963635.
https://scholarworks.utep.edu/dissertations/AAI28963635

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