A good example of why transportation demand management planning should be mandatory

Washcycle reports via this Gazette article, "City planners give go-ahead for science center," that Montgomery College, the community college system for Montgomery County, Maryland, doesn't want to install bicycle racks at the Rockville campus, after being directed to by the MoCo Planning Department. See "If you don't build it they won't come (and then you won't have to build it)."

I guess the MoCol Adminstration doesn't keep up with the national reporting on how universities (granted, Montgomery College is a two-year school) are focusing new attention on promoting bicycling instead of driving, in part because it's cheaper to accommodate bicycles rather than build more parking lots and parking structures. See "With Free Bikes, Challenging Car Culture on Campus" from the New York Times. (Both Washcycle and I have written about this in past entries.)

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Transportation Demand Management planning should be required for all institutions. All institutions should be required to accommodate modes other than cars. TDM planning should be focused primarily on reducing single occupancy vehicle trips.

The San Diego Union-Tribune has an article on the bicycling on college campus phenomenon, as part of a broader article on college campus mobility. I like the primary headline "Changing ways of commuters" (the subtitle is "Colleges use rewards to entice students, staff to go green") because it sums up in 4 succinct words the point of transportation demand management--changing the way of commuting, to make mobility easier and more efficient, sustainable and cheaper...

Speaking of transportation demand management, at Portland State University's library and at the bookstore for the University of Washington there are extensive information racks on transit.

And of course, some colleges have programs with the local transit authority to provide transit-riding privileges as part of the student identification card system. This is something that Don Shoup of parking fame (author of the book, The High Cost of Free Parking) has researched and written about in the past, see "Unlimited Access" (co-authored with Jeffrey Brown and Daniel Baldwin Hess).

All universities and colleges in the region should be required to do transportation demand management, and promote transit positively, with a real focus on reduction of automobile trips.