Yet at San Diego Mesa College, car poolers are entitled to rock star parking. At San Diego City College, 33 choice parking spots soon will be reserved for hybrids and other high-fuel-efficiency vehicles.
 NANCEE E. LEWIS / Union-Tribune Kim De Wolff, 27, a graduate student at UCSD, sought bike parking on campus Wednesday. The university has floated incentives to students who choose not to drive. |
 NANCEE E. LEWIS / Union-Tribune Katie Burrell, 19, who is studying sociology and psychology at UCSD, parked her bike on campus Wednesday. |
“We're seeing programs where students get free bus passes. We've seen car-sharing programs, bike-sharing programs. Schools going to four-day weeks. Some schools will actually pay you not to drive to campus,” said Julian Dautremont-Smith, associate director of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education in Lexington, Ky.
Stanford University pays students and employees up to $282 a year for not driving at all, or at least not driving alone. This fall, freshmen at Ripon College in Wisconsin who agreed to leave their cars at home received a free Trek mountain bike, helmet and lock worth about $450.
Also, new bike-sharing programs are popping up throughout the nation, replacing problematic older programs, Dautremont-Smith said.
 NANCEE E. LEWIS / Union-Tribune Jessica Wall (left) participates in UCSD's Pedal Club, which rewards bicyclists with 10 free days of car parking per year. Fellow student Toby Hammer rode behind. |
Newer programs, such as Triton Bikes at University of California San Diego, involve more accountability. Students must show their driver's license and student ID to check out a free bike at stations around campus. The 120 or so bikes were previously abandoned on campus, refurbished and covered with yellow vinyl tape.
“They're not the prettiest, but we try to make them functional and identifiable,” said Rhett Miller, who's in charge of the program.
UCSD is trying a number of ways to discourage students and employees from driving.
For a Ditch Your Car Competition last spring, students who agreed not to drive to campus for a month received a month's worth of free alternative transportation, such as the train or bus – modes that are on the rise nationally.
Americans took more than 2.8 billion trips on public transportation in the second quarter of 2008, almost 140 million more than in the same period last year, according to the American Public Transportation Association. Nearly 11 percent of public transportation users are students, according to a May 2007 association report.
Last year, UCSD fine-tuned its free shuttle service to transport 1,000 more people with 10 fewer buses. In a few weeks, the service will include a special Greenline bus powered by biodiesel.
Meanwhile, UCSD's popular Pedal Club gives 10 free days of parking each quarter to students and others who commit to riding their bikes to campus most of the time.
Senior Jessica Wall joined last winter because it was cheaper and more environmentally friendly. She owns a car but uses it only at night or for long distances. Plus, a growing number of her friends bike.
“It's almost like peer pressure,” she said. “The more people that do it, the more you realize you can do it, too. You realize, 'I don't need to drive.' ”
Senior Michelle Kizner joined the Pedal Club about a year ago to get the free parking permit. She never used it.
“I'm a huge environmentalist,” she said. “(Driving) creates pollution, basically, and I can't know the impact and not do something about it.”
The University of San Diego unveiled two Zipcars in September to discourage students and staffers from bringing their own cars on campus. Zipcar is a car-sharing service available on more than 100 college campuses nationally, including UCSD.
After paying a membership fee of $35 a year, students can rent a Zipcar for $9 an hour, said André Mallié, executive director of auxiliary services at USD. The cost of gas, insurance and parking is included.
Because parking is such an issue, many schools have leveraged their parking lots to reward environmentally conscious behavior. San Diego State University has 52 car pool spots in two faculty lots and subsidizes bus and trolley passes. California State University San Marcos has 80 prime car pool spaces for students and employees in the main lots. Permits for these spots have sold out in recent semesters.
“This year we sold out before the school year even started,” said Deb Schmidt, campus commuter coordinator at Cal State San Marcos.
Robert DeMartini, student government president at City College, supports the upcoming spots slated for fuel-efficient vehicles.
“It's more or less a stand to say we are environmentally sound and sensitive,” he said.
But, he added, it's a double-edged sword.
“Maybe not a lot of students can afford a hybrid, especially at a community college,” he said. “And would the most eco-friendly people be driving in the first place?”
A community college district spokeswoman said the spots also would be for faculty and staff and make up a small percentage of the 727 total spots in the parking structure.
As gas prices peaked nationally at $4.11 a gallon in July, a number of community colleges around the country began exploring ways to alleviate the burden for students.
Coastal Bend College, for example, shifted to a four-day instructional week on its Beeville, Texas, campus over the summer. The move was so popular that its three other campuses did the same this fall.
J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College in Richmond, Va., wanted to do more. So this semester, the school unveiled Fuel $mart Fridays. The program enables students to take all their classes on Fridays.
“We know our students are pushed for money for gas, and we had started discussing how we were going to remove barriers for students going back to school,” said Nannette Smith, associate vice president of academic affairs.
With a typical student commuting about 20 miles a day, the program can save them from driving 80 miles a week or 1,280 miles a semester, according to the college.
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