The challenges to overcome when merging university parking and transit departments

Merging a pair of public universities brings with it many challenges. Among them, how to combine parking and transit systems into a single, functional entity.

That’s precisely what Mike Martindill, vice president of Timothy Haahs & Associates, and Mitch Skyer, president of Passio Technologies, explore in article titled “Big Picture” and published in the latest issue of The Parking Professional. The two companies joined forces to counsel Medical College of Georgia and Augusta State University during their recent merger to create Georgia Regents University (soon to be renamed Augusta University).

The goal was to develop a practical operations plan that, once implemented, would benefit the faculty and students who use the system and the administrators who oversee its operations.

“Connectivity between campuses, proper allocation and sharing of parking resources, adequate parking, improved mobility, identifying technology enhancements, and the implementation of new parking management initiatives were all primary elements of the parking and transit master plan,” they wrote.

One of the first recommendations was a “mission-critical proposal to hire a new champion for the consolidated university’s parking and transit system.” The director-level position reports to the school’s vice president of auxiliary services and is the person ultimately responsible for implementing the new parking and transit system.

From there, the team made recommendations on the precise parking and transit management solutions the school should implement.

“Recommendations to influence parking decisions, such as assigned permitting, installing gate controlled access, and clearly separating patient, employee, and student parking in an enforceable manner, were made,” they wrote. “These recommendations were of primary importance to the transit system as they allowed the planning to be based on predictable and enforceable behavior.”

See below to read the entire piece.