College explores new transportation options

By: Michelle Anstett
Editor-in-chief

The constant headache of parking on a campus whose student population is growing more quickly than the amount of available parking spaces may be alleviated by the office of student affairs sometime in the future.

According to Mauri Ditzler, president of Monmouth College, the administration began looking at offering more transportation options to students “as just a parking issue.” In the past, he said, there has not been the demand for parking as the last few years have shown, as more students bring cars to campus and the student body has grown.

The college wants to look at options in order to “cut down on the need to add additional parking lots,” Ditzler said.

The idea of building a parking garage has been tossed around in the past, but the cost to build one is prohibitive, Jacquelyn Condon, dean of students and vice president for student life, said.

To build a parking garage, it would cost the college approximately $10,000 per slot, making the cost astronomical for a campus this size, as the college would need to create approximately 400 parking spots.

One option into which the college is looking is to create a relationship with Warren Achievement Center (WAC) Transportation, whose blue and white minibuses can be seen driving around town. The college has had a relationship with WAC Transportation in the past, but the infrastructure was not in place at that time in order to make things work as they should have.

Currently, WAC Transportation operates all over the area, providing transportation for those who do not have a means to get from one place to another. Right now, Condon said, it is a matter of “will it be possible to also stop on the college campus and provide transportation to students for a nominal fee.” This may alleviate the necessity for some students to bring cars on campus, and would also provide transportation for those who do not have cars of their own.

Another option which the college is investigating is to hire an off-site rental company who would provide the college with a small fleet of vehicles for student use.

The logistics of this option are much more complex, as it would require insurance policies to be changed and would also require figuring out a way for students to borrow the vehicles.

If one of these options works out for Monmouth College, Condon stated the college “might be able to get to the place where students won’t have to bring vehicles to campus.”

Ditzler agreed, saying the college would need to find a way to make the options “reliable and convenient and inexpensive” for students to utilize. He also hopes, by opening up transportation options for students, that students would spend more weekends on campus.

If transportation were readily available for spur-of-the-moment trips to Galesburg or the Quad Cities, students could “use Monmouth as their base and move around a little.” This way, he said, students would spend more time on campus during the weekends, studying and attending campus events.

Condon added that another option the college is investigating is the use of some recently purchased land to the east of campus. Within four or five years, she said, the physical plant building would move out to that land, and the site of the current physical plant would be used for student parking, mostly for underclassmen. Upperclassmen would be the only ones able to park on campus if this option were utilized.

At the moment, however, all options are in the planning stages and the college is evaluating many different possibilities. Most likely, nothing will change until next fall, at the earliest.