News & Insights
Photo courtesy of: Greg Land
Parking and transportation for students and faculty/staff continues to be a hot topic across the country at our nation’s leading higher education institutions. Most institutions recognize the need for parking infrastructure on their campuses, but many do not appreciate the high cost of building, operating, and maintaining those assets. Additionally, historical budget challenges have led many institutions to defer maintenance on their parking infrastructure and technology, resulting in a degraded user experience. Post‑pandemic travel patterns, mode shifts, and institutional sustainability goals are also prompting a reexamination of parking’s role within broader campus mobility systems.
At many schools, affordability and access remain a challenge, as proximate parking is priced at a premium, and surface parking lots are displaced for new campus development, pushing students, faculty, and staff to peripheral lots or longer commutes. Competition for students and faculty is intensifying, putting pressure on U.S. institutions to offer reliable, predictable, and equitable access to campus through a mix of low-cost parking, transit subsidies, and micromobility. Additionally, recent trends in inflation and total cost of attendance have made everything more expensive for faculty/staff and students, making it politically more difficult for institutions to increase permit prices and student fees to cover rising system operating and maintenance costs.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to providing parking and campus mobility options. A growing number of campuses are piloting daily or pay‑as‑you‑go permits, demand-responsive pricing, and technology-enabled wayfinding to improve utilization and the overall commuter experience. A number of institutions have also leveraged private partners and concessions to modernize operations, implement technology (ALPR, mobile payments), and deliver capital projects. P3s and long‑term concessions can transfer lifecycle maintenance risk and accelerate system modernization.
Ultimately, decisions about parking are driven by institutional strategy. Some of our clients are intentionally reducing parking footprints to support climate and space-optimization goals, backfilling with mobility hubs, improving transit, and using demand-based pricing to better manage demand. Others are investing in structured parking at the campus edge, coupled with shuttles and pedestrian improvements, to consolidate surface lots and unlock core land for academic or research uses. Still others are monetizing their entire parking and transportation systems through long-term concession transactions, which can provide these institutions with capital to invest in other mission-critical infrastructure and programs.
