Student Parking: Economic Rationing at Mount Holyoke

Student Parking: Economic Rationing at Mount Holyoke

By Auste, Gabriela, Jenna and Regina

While studying for Microeconomics midterm in the library, we have heard someone complaining that it is so hard to find a space to park a car on campus. And this is not the first time we hear such complaints... Many people say that even though they are required to pay a lot for a parking space (150 dollars a year), they are never able to find a spot quickly. When they finally succeed, they realize that their residence hall is so far away from the parking lot. Yet, when you come back the next day, you find a parking ticket, because you accidentally parked you car in a wrong parking lot…

At Mount Holyoke we are given a lot of free, more precisely included in the tuition, goods, such as a room, a bed, a closet, a table, a chair, three meals a day, activities in the residence halls, public lectures, art museum, gym… But what about a very important thing for a student – a parking space? Generally, if you have a car, you are likely to use a parking space many more times than you visit the museum. It is so convenient to bring your car to the campus and go to the other towns or colleges with your friends since PVTA buses are never on schedule or do not arrive when you need to catch it before your final exam at another college.

Well, if you are an economist, you quickly see that the parking fee is just the economic rationing. Rationing is used in order to have a relatively stable level of consumption of some good, because when a fee is imposed, the demand for the good decreases. Sometimes, this method is also used to discourage bad behavior, such as high taxes on the cigarettes to prevent people from smoking.

There are a few possible reasons why we have a parking fee (tax). One reason is that Mount Holyoke is trying to be green. It is trying to reduce consumption of water, electricity, to-go containers, and probably the number of vehicles on campus. Reducing the cars reduces the pollution, so we will have cleaner air. The other, more likely, reason is that there is a limited amount of parking places available for students, so in order to have a sufficient amount without a need for expansion, we need to have a fee, which would decrease the demand for having a car on campus. A quite old (2003-2006) statistical data table on Mount Holyoke website suggests, that the amount of student cars on campus has already slightly decreased. This may have happened due to the parking fee since the number of students increases every year.

In conclusion, this example shows that not only the government uses rationing to control undesirable behavior, but also the college practices such methods to control students’ behavior on campus.

But the reality is: bring your car, pay the fee, and you will have a lot of friends (who will use your car as a public good to go to the mall).