Date: Mon, 14 Jul 2008 12:18:22 -0400
From: Claire Kane
Subject: Chatham Park & Ride is for UNC Commuters
If you have receive a personal identification number as a temporary employee of the UNC University or Hospital, you will qualify to join the Commuter Alternative Program and park in the lot.
Anyone can use Southern Village’s park and ride lot and also the Eubanks, Carrboro, 54 (near Friday Center) and Jones Ferry park & ride lots. These are completely open to the public and also have free transit service.
Southern Village lot is exactly two miles further up the road on the left. The Jones Ferry lot is also convenient and always has space. Taking Smith Level Road gets you rock-throwing distance from the Jones ferry lot.
Traditionally, neighbors to Universities have a real issue with UNC-ers taking up all the on-street parking and so UNC builds and pays for dedicated parking.
The Chatham park & ride was built to accommodate members of the UNC Commuter Alternative Program. These are people who agree not to take up a parking space (or cannot get a permit) on UNC’s campus which has 16,000 parking spaces for the 11,000 staff of the hospital and the university and the 30,000+ students. The costs to build such a lot are well upwards of $15,000 per parking space!
UNC’s portion of these programs are all paid for by student fees, “taxes” to UNC departments, and the sale of parking permits to those who DO park on campus. So although the Chatham park & ride is sitting right there in plain view it is not a public area. There has not been a decision to open up the UNC-funded park & ride lots to the general public – yes, that’s right, even if there is space available. So you can take the bus that runs out of the lot, if you are not affiliated with UNC but you can’t park there. That’s the deal.
Why are the buses free to all? They are not really free of course. Someone is paying for them. This decision has been made, and UNC is the majority contributor to the bus system among the non-federal/state partners to the tune of 6.1 million dollars per year.
By the way, stormwater and parking lot paving is a big environmental issue (think “dirty polluted poisonous water rolling down streets into rivers, think “floods”). Although the lot LOOKS like any old parking lot, it contains a new kind of “porous paving”.
With this environmentally sensitive kind of paving, there are three layers: a porous paving, a thick layer of gravel and a layer of clay soil So instead of stormwater running off the paving and causing stormwater issues, it falls in the lot slowly and filters down INTO the paving, where it is caught by the layer of gravel and stored as it begins to slowly trickle down into the soil, where pollutants conveyed from the parking lot are filtered out.
Peace and cheers!
Claire Kane
[ad#336×280]