The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Transportation and Parking Five-Year Plan, which was finalized by the Advisory Committee on Transportation (ACT) in 2017 and approved by the Executive Sponsor Group, is in the second year of implementation.
The Five-Year Plan is the financial strategy to fund the University’s parking and transportation systems from Fiscal Year 2017 through Fiscal Year 2022 and includes customer enhancements and new programs for the system to campus, the implementation of a new parking program and the roll out of fee changes over the course of the next five years. The five enhancements are:
- LED lighting installed in four parking decks at Carolina beginning 2017 through 2022, to increase visibility for safety and decrease environmental impact.
- Updated Parking Access Revenue Control System (PARCS) to reduce operating costs, increase overall parking reliability and improve resource management.
- TransLoc, a smart phone app, to increase efficiency and safety by providing real-time GPS tracking and reducing wait times through new, Point-to-Point on-demand reservations.
- Tar Heel Bikes launched in October 2017 to provide a sustainable intra-campus transportation option, reduce carbon emissions and parking demands.
- Campus Bird maps on the Transportation and Parking website to inform campus about construction, events, parking and transportation routes.
In addition to these enhancements, the Weeknight Parking Program is part of the next phase of implementation of the Five-Year Plan. A Weeknight Parking Working Group with representatives from across campus and the surrounding community is now meeting to discuss stakeholder feedback and determine the best path forward for implementation in August 2019. Due to concerns about equity in subsidizing the overall cost of the parking system, ACT chose to issue annual weeknight parking permits to employees who do not have daytime or park-and-ride permits.
Daytime permits issued to employees and all student permits will be honored at night. After several outreach sessions over the course of the 2017-2018 academic year, feedback identified the unintentional impact of weeknight parking on daytime employees who use alternative modes of transportation during the day and are required to return to campus at night to work beyond a 40-hour work week. This includes postdoctoral fellows who frequently return to campus after 5 p.m. To address this issue, daytime employee commuters who do not have a daytime permit and return frequently to campus on weeknights may purchase an annual weeknight permit at the cost of $25. Daytime employee commuters who come back to campus less frequently may utilize the following occasional-use options:
- Free – Twenty weeknight permits per semester
- $1 – temporary one-night pass
The Five-Year Plan includes fee changes to daytime parking and visitor rates throughout the plan. It is important to note that there are no planned increases to healthcare patient/visitor parking rates. More information may be found on the Transportation and Parking website.
Future updates on the Five-Year Plan will be posted in Fall 2018, and on-going updates will be posted to the website.