In my role as a university administrator, parking is something that comes up frequently. Students hate just about everything about and seem to understand very little about the practical logistics of it.

Parking lots are really expensive. They have enormous footprints. My institution is landlocked on all four sides by major thoroughfares. Expansion of the campus facilities isn't practically possible, and even though the campus is a good 200+ acres, new facilities are constantly being built or expanded. Every new building to accommodate the institutional mission means fewer parking lots at the same time that enrollment is increasing to fill the new facilities.

The answer is to go vertical with parking garages, or locate off campus parking with shuttle transport. Both are enormously expensive.

Parking garages cost a shitload of money to construct. They're just plain expensive. Remote lots cost a lot to construct, but have the added inconvenience of requiring reoccurring costs in the form of shuttle drivers and remote parking enforcement.

Parking enforcement is a necessity as soon as you start charging for parking. You have to protect the revenue stream, because at most institutions, parking is self supporting. They have to collect fees to maintain and expand services, which requires them to collect fees. While parking can bring in a lot of revenue for an institution, it generally only pays for itself, and usually falls short.

For the sake of math, lets say you have 10,000 spaces. The cost for each space is $250 a semester. This is way below the average cost per semester, but it's a nice round number. That's an annual revenue of $5,000,000.

Out of that $5 mil you have to pay for all of your operational expenses including maintenance on the parking lots, the meters, the gates, the parking garage, painting the parking lines, repairing the parking bumpers, servers and software to maintain your enforcement database, licensing and fees to procure and distribute your permits, fuel for your shuttles, repairs and preventative maintenance on your shuttle vehicles as well as your enforcement vehicles. Then there's your wages. Hourly wages for part timers as well as full time wages including fringe which tends to run above 20% of salary depending on your benefit package. Wages and operations tend to take up the majority of your annual expenses. Whatever is left, somewhere between %10 and %20 of your operations budget, so lets say $750,000 goes towards paying down bonds used as capital payment on the construction of the parking garage and land acquisition for the remote lot.

In the end, since parking is frequently run as a service center, the costs come very close to equaling the expenses and in many institutions the bylaws require the service center to have a $0 annual budget overage.

And after all that, and all the people who get involved to provide a service to students as a convenience to them, all they can do is bitch about how they had to walk for five or ten minutes because they couldn't park closer to their classroom. A lot of institutions these days, especially ones in higher real estate markets or with land locked campuses, are taking a closer look at campus parking and asking, "is it worth our trouble, to expend so much effort and expense, if nothing will please them?" I've heard of institutions simple eliminating on campus parking altogether, and partnering with local public transport as a more effective and cost efficient strategy.