Not that it will matter:
Dear University of Oregon Faculty, and Staff:
We need your help! Transportation Services conducts a yearly survey to better understand how students, faculty, and staff commute to and from campus. This survey provides a snapshot of commuting trends and your input will help inform transportation planning and programs on campus. Due to a distribution error, your email was not included in the initial survey notification. If a colleague has already forwarded the survey to you, you do not need to retake it.
The survey is anonymous and should take you around 5 minutes or less to complete. It will be open until midnight on November 7, 2019.
When you complete the survey, you may enter your UO email in a raffle to win one of two $50 gift certificates or one of four $25 gift cards to the Duck Store.
The following link will take you to the survey: [Links removed at Josh’s request to avoid messing up his results. Survey was emailed to all fac and staff and a sample of students].
Thank you for your time! Feel free to contact me with any questions or concerns.
Sincerely,
Josh Kashinsky
Active Transportation Coordinator
Transportation Services
Oh geez-us. You guys are a bunch of whiners. Ride a bike, take the bus, walk. Yeah I can already here you kvetching about living too far, you hate the people on the bus which runs too infrequently, yadayadayadaya. I am sorry to hear how hard it is to damn shown up at work!
Come on, bitching about parking is a close as this country will ever come to unifying political discourse.
If a hippo can ride a bike, so can you. And on the occasions when I do take the bus, the most objectionable people are actually my colleagues.
Wow Hippo you are a privileged ablelist jerk! Not everyone can ride a bike to work and not everyone can afford that hour to commute! Get real you know parking is a horror on campus and could be improved quite easily.
Thanks for your civil contribution to the parking debate. As Half-Priced Provost I hereby award you 1/2 a reserved parking spot. While you’re waiting to collect it, you might want to watch this cautionary video: https://youtu.be/tQ4KJhrcHtc?t=10
Also, your UOM screen name is now Wow Hippo. Use it.
Thanks for the entertaining movie! I give it 5 rotten tomatoes. NB: More people die from hippos in Africa than from any other (large) animal.
I am aware some people are unable to ride a bike. If you reed my comment, it is addressed to uomatters who I am confident can ride a bike.
Also, please see me comments below. Actually for me (and for may others, should they choose) bicycling is actually faster than driving, considering door-to-door time. So your argument about “affording that hour to commute” is ridiculous. As for “privilege”, I have an hour commute because I cannot afford to live closer to campus.
to Wow Hippo
The parking situation has been bad for about the last 20 years
and made worse when the Jock Box replaced the Oregon Hall parking lot.
If the parking situation really could be “easily improved” I suspect this would have happened. Now the UO could go out of its way to make it hard to improve, and while this is likely, the UO is bounded and was never laid out to accommodate the size that has become
And… Wow Hippo, since you called me out on my supposedly ablest POV: people with documented need to drive to campus can obtain reserved spots, so they are not the folks kvetching here. The rest of us should take a bit of the time we spend hocking loogies at the steam room at the Downtown Athletic Club (you know who you are), or playing golf, or reading the “fiscally conservative but socially libertarian” dribble in The Economist, and reallocate to a sensible commuting strategy. (Although, I will reiterate, driving may *not* be the most time-efficient commute strategy; please try a fuller search of the optimization space.) I KNOW, you say you don’t have *any* such unstructured time outside of your research and teaching, so save the time telling me that.
1 ) “people with documented need to drive to campus can obtain reserved spots…”
There’s no such thing as a “Documented need to drive” so I assume you’re talking about a “Documented physical handicap” whereby a person can spend even more money on a reserved spot if they have a handicapped permit. FYI: not everyone who is physically unable to bike, walk, or bus in to campus qualifies for a handicapped permit and those reserved spots.
2) It’s not always simple “inconvenience” that’s the biggest issue when needing to rely on our limited public transport system.
It’s “inconvenient” to take a 45 minute bus ride if you’re leaving campus to go home and make dinner. It is potentially *life threatening* to not be able to get to ongoing medical treats, evening jobs, and/or family emergencies in a timely fashion.
3) American infrastructure is designed for cars to be central to our lives. Until that changes, an awful lot of people will not have good alternatives to driving.
Thus, limited parking is a serious issue and should not be dismissed as only important to entitled whiners who should get some exercise anyway.
My only bike is this old Frejus pista, with a block chain and sew-ups. I rode it to work once. I’m still whole, which is more than I can say for a lot of bike riding friends. I’m thinking about a motorized skateboard, like the cool kids on campus.
Pretty nice. My fixie runs 28’s, anything smaller is stupid on Eugene streets.
Thanks. I live on a bit of a hill, and didn’t realize a big gear would make it harder to lock the wheel. It was terrifying. You’re a brave man. Or whatever you are.
there are several real life considerations that matter if you can leave and come back to campus in an efficient way. I will just provide one example applied to me.
Having children
Teaching a class at 10 am and then another one at 2 pm
Accident or whatever happens at home around 12 – have to get home, deal with real life shit, and get back to campus before second class starts
pretty much impossible to do
You mention some good reasons not have children. Plus all the good work you may do biking and recycling (or these days, “recycling”) will be overwhelmed by the carbon footprint of simply reproducing. Yes, let the egg throwing begin. The breeders are even more aggrieved than the drivers!
But seriously: I live > 3 miles away and it is a 20 minute bike ride door-to-door. It’s a 30 minute drive including parking time. So I don’t understand your argument.
There is a very old ditty [ I heard it many decades ago],asking the following question to various campus groups:
what do you want?
Answers….
students: sex
alumni: intercollegiant sports [ misspelled on purpose]
faculty: parking
faculty: parking plus free beer
The original quotation is from UC President Clark Kerr’s seminal book on American high education: “The Uses of the University”, (1963) Kerr wrote the three purposes of the university are “to provide sex for the students, sports for the alumni, and parking for the faculty.” My favorite Kerr quotation occurred when Governor Ronald Reagan led the successful effort to get rid of him following the anti-war demonstrations at Berkeley. Kerr noted he left the UC presidency: as he entered it: “fired with enthusiasm”. Classic!
Gee, thanks for REAL source: my personal source was older faculty when I was a new assistant prof almost half a century ago. They may have credited Kerr, but all I remember is the content.
I also live high up on a hill. The closest city bus stop is a full mile away. If the bus would run even somewhat closer to me, say it stopped 1/2 mile away, I’d happily take it. Maybe someday.
These are the kinds of things that one should consider when one buys a house.
These are the kinds of considerations that fuel home prices…
Nonsense. There are tons of affordable places close to UO, north of the river, easy to get to by bus or bike. I do it, and chose where to live based on in part on transit. I don’t live on a remote woodsy hill and then complain that I have to drive.
I believe “affordable places close to UO” is an oxymoron.
They still exist. I have a friend who bought a small house last year, four blocks south of the UO campus, for a price that would easily be affordable on the salary of most UO employees. I have worked at the UO for ten-plus years with a family income at about 110-120% of Eugene’s median, including years of taking kids to and from school and/or child care daily (all walking or biking less than a mile), and I have never bought a UO parking permit. You can afford a lot more house (or a lot more location) if you don’t need to drive. It is possible.
How do you define “affordable” Porcupine? Because I’m pretty sure there is nowhere within anyone’s idea of “close to UO” that charges what some of us can afford.
How one defines “close” is another question worth asking. If we can define enough of these variables, we can put an equation up on the HR jobs site so people can more easily determine if it’s worth applying for the job…
Porcupine: “tons of affordable places close to UO…”
I call “bullpucky”.
I suppose “affordable” depends on the individual. I couldn’t find an “affordable”, for me, house to buy.
Buses where I live suck. And others’ “ride a bike” is ablist tripe.
Wait–instead of using this survey to get UO to improve public transit, people are bitching about wanting more ugly, unsustainable, polluting parking? That is a gross waste of opportunity.