Students with a vehicle know the difficulty in finding parking spaces on campus, even with a parking pass. USC administrators hope that problem will be solved through the Innovista Master Plan.
The Innovista Master Plan, which hopes to improve campus wide transportation, was presented during a forum in Russell House Monday night, where students were encouraged to voice their opinions on what they believe USC truly needs in terms of parking.
“Our goal is to make campus a place that really fulfills all the potential it has,” said Andrew McClurg, a senior associate at Sasaki Associates Incorporated.
Although USC has a bus system and has earned the League of American Bicyclists’ Bike Friendly University Bronze Level Award, there's still a long way to go before the campus is fully accessible. Traffic, parking and accessibility are the issues that have worsened as campus has spread towards the Vista.
As of now, the Innovista Master Plan is an outline of methods campus can use to become more bicycle, vehicle and pedestrian friendly, all while developing Columbia into a college city. According to university officials, the main goal is to create a safe campus and improve sustainability, all while being cost effective.
The Plan focuses on improving facilities that already exist and remodeling them to be more efficient. Greene Street, for example, has become a pedestrian friendly road, with wide sidewalks, bike lanes and trees lining the side of the street. Using that kind of a model, the plan will improve congested streets like Sumter Street, Main Street and Assembly Street, in order to make all of Columbia more accessible to students.
McClurg and others who are developing the Innovista Master Plan have a vision of a mobile campus, one that has far less traffic and better parking facilities. One of the proposed ideas to combat this issue is adopting a “park once philosophy.”
The park once philosophy, as McClurg explained, is where a student would buy a permit to park their car in a single parking lot or garage and then would continue to class via a university bus or by walking. This would reduce street parking and traffic around campus while utilizing pre-existing university transportation.
However, the idea was met with some dissent at the forum.
Students voiced issues with the current bus system and specifically brought up the fact that the buses do not operate late at night, and it's often difficult to tell when buses will arrive, even with the aid of the NextBus app.
“There’s got to be a way to make parking and shuttle systems more rational, more effective in getting you to class in a timely fashion," McClurg said. "We’ll work on that,"
Specifically, Michael Townes, the Vice President of CDM Smith and another member of the Transportation Master Plan’s board, explained that the university is potentially considering using new technologies, such as an improved smartphone app that will allow students to better determine where buses will be.