Long ago, as a child, I was told that driving is a privilege, not a right. It makes sense, right? To ensure that only the most capable get behind a wheel, we hold prospective drivers to high standards. After all, being at least sixteen years old is a pretty high standard and does demonstrate that you would be ready to deal with all the stresses of the road. However, the idea that you are a driver by privilege, and not by right, has been an easy way for practices such as paying for parking to continue unchecked. If we were to see human rights as encompassing access to and personal use of transportation, just as we do basic shelter needs, the conversation would be massively different in that we would see adjacent services and practices as being necessary to the right. To be clear, I am not arguing that we see access to a personal vehicle as a human right, I am simply bringing it up to vent my frustrations with the amazing parking infrastructure our lovely commuter school has set up for all students, faculty, alumni, and guests to use.
Living near Toronto and visiting it quite frequently, I have learned that a) the TTC sucks, and b) the alternative of driving sucks almost equally as much. For starters, traffic is a nightmare and makes a breezy five minute journey to Tim’s a damp twenty minute long expedition. Also, pedestrians in Toronto may just be AI-generated characters whose sole purpose is to jaywalk. However, my absolute least favourite part about driving in Toronto has to be the parking. There are two types of Toronto parking: Street parking, and then parking lots. The first, street parking, is basically impossible to access unless you are planning on parallel parking, to which I say: “no, thank you.” The second, which involves using a parking lot, is cumbersome in that it changes your trip planning by messing with the time of arrival, seeing as how far away parking lots often are from your destination. The cherry on top is that these are paid spots, so you pay to be late.
While York University is not exactly in the heart of Toronto, it borrows a lot of the city planning formulas. There are a handful of parking lots, some reserved and some pay-per-day, sprawled out around campus. For a commuter school, you would think that something like this would perhaps be free or be subsidized to cost a nominal amount. You would be wrong. Fine, surely faculty get parking spots reserved for them and do not have to pay, right? That is also in fact wrong. Faculty pay through the Payroll Deduction program (or they can pay the same way students do) where a portion of their paycheck goes to financing a parking spot. I do not think York has gone far enough; they can still make more money. For example, why not charge students and faculty a daily fee for using the lecture rooms? If York wants to charge for the use of land on their campus, we can also even give everyone a bracelet that tracks steps for the day and then charges per step. The point I am attempting to illustrate is just how ridiculous it is to charge for parking, specifically charging those who contribute to York via tuition payments or through their teaching services. Sure, in Toronto, you as the city owe nothing to the people who choose to park within your boundaries, as they may be out of town and therefore not contributing to city taxes. That is equally also not a city problem because the economy functions by allowing free-market entrepreneurs to buy land and set up the land to be used as a parking lot, so stifling those processes is counter-intuitive to the capitalist mindset. In this case though, York is not in the business of selling parking spots. So why do we pay for them?
Circling back to my first point, I do think York’s parking scheme finds its roots in the privilege versus right debate. On one hand, as a privilege, you would hold complimentary services to a lower degree of importance. As such, because driving is optional, paying for parking is also optional; it is a link in the same chain. If you did not drive, you would not have to pay for parking. On the other hand, as a right, complimentary services would be deemed equally important, which undoubtedly would result in either low-rate or free parking spots. Unfortunately for our wallets, Canadian society is not reflective of that kind of thinking. So, York University is allowed to be a school that takes tuition payments and incidentally a parking service provider because we have assigned a low level of importance to driving and subsequent adjacent services. That being said, charging students and faculty the same, if not higher, rates for parking (fifteen dollars per day, twenty dollars if you park in a garage) as Toronto is quite greedy. I am not willing to accept the argument that York charges such a high amount because they want to incentivize people to take public transportation. If that were the case, the parking lots would be useless and York would lose out on a nice share of additional revenue from students. Instead, I believe York has found the equilibrium price, or just about close to it, for how they should be pricing their parking. As such, there is little to no incentive for York to provide free parking to its students or faculty.
Ultimately, while I would love to see free parking (as someone who drives to classes everyday), it is unreasonable to believe that York will change this anytime in the near future, if not raise the prices. Until supply overtakes demand, the price can continue to be raised. I do believe that including it in the tuition, without raising the payments, would do a lot for the goodwill of its students. The cynical question I want to part with, however, is: “does York even care?” Is the goodwill of its students, which has been eroded to its core throughout the years, really of any concern to York? If high-rate parking is just a microcosm of the York mentality towards student accessibility, then what hope is there for York to overhaul their tuition payment structure? At the end of the day, money drives everything.