Don’t Go Now, Doug – We Still Need You!
By Doug Holmes Parking industry veteran Doug Holmes, a former IPI Board
Chairman and President of the Pennsylvania Parking Association, recently announced his retirement as Director of Transportation Serv- ices at The Pennsylvania State University in State College. Editor.
When JVH asked me to write “a farewell article” for PT and “give us your take
on university parking,” I was both flattered and irked. “Farewell,” indeed! In the end, my ego accepted flattery. The request made me
think a lot about where park- ing was when I entered the industry from the police side of the house. At the time, I was a young
It did not take long before I realized that managing park-
ing on a major college campus such as Penn State is no walk in the park. First, you have the politics that exist at any universi- ty where someone is always more important than anyone else on campus.
Also, invariably, you have
If you don’t keep the students out of the restricted parking, you won’t have enough spaces to satisfy the “real” visitors, faculty, patients, doctors.
father with two daughters who barely recognized me due to shifts, court, training, etc., working Christmases, weekends, Penn State football games, etc., and was rarely around for the fun times, such as when they were awake. So I quit the police depart- ment and got myself a steady job, as the saying goes.
to deal with a parking deck or lot that is open to certain facul- ty and staff, closed to students, and open to visiting public at an hourly rate. Keeping stu- dents out is pretty tough, because you have to know they are truly visitors and not stu- dents visiting class. If you don’t keep the stu-
dents out of the restricted park- ing, you won’t have enough
spaces to satisfy the “real” visitors, faculty, patients, doctors – insert client type here – and then those groups will complain. But if you are successful in keeping students out and wind up having empty spaces, you are losing revenue in unsold hourly parking. This is a very delicate balance to maintain. Then, at Penn State, there is
Nittany Lions football. On a typical football Saturday, Beaver Stadium becomes the third-largest city in Pennsylvania. Our record crowd was just over 110,000 – and stated capacity is 107,000-plus. With an average of three to four people per vehicle, that means we have to deal with a ton of cars. (And, of course, all these
people are always sane, rational, civil folks.)
Fortunately, we have ample
agriculture land that we use to park most of the 35,000 or so vehicles that we get per game. This is crucial, because there are only 17,500 hard- surface spaces on the entire campus. Football, generally, is not that
Doug Holmes and friend…PSU’s mascot, the famous Nittany Lion. 26
big of a problem. Logistically tough, however, is when someone sched- ules a basketball game in the arena across the street from the football stadium within hours of kickoff. Similarly challenging is dealing with a major rock concert in January when the grass parking is unavail- able and we know parking demand will force fans across campus.
Continued on Page 28 Parking Today
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