By SUSAN JONES
The sites available for day-to-day parking on the Oakland campus, using the ParkMobile app, will soon be accessed through a new app that requires a Pitt sign-on, according to Jonathan Pearson, director of parking and transportation.
The University partnered with ParkMobile when people started coming back to campus during the pandemic. The sites currently available to reserve spaces are: Posvar Garage, the OC Lot; the U Lot at the VA Hospital; the Ruskin Hall Lot and the Panther Hollow Lot.
The problem has been that those spots, which can be reserved several weeks in advance, now fill up quickly, and not always with Pitt faculty, staff and students.
“I think now that ParkMobile has been on campus basically since COVID, the usage has just skyrocketed,” Pearson said. “Everyone knows it’s there. It is public facing. So I just think that there’s that stronger usage of people buying up the available spaces.”
Pearson, whose department is part of the Office of Business, Hospitality and Auxiliary Services, said they’ve been working with a developer to create a parking app like ParkMobile, but that would be exclusive to the University and only accessible to those with a Pitt sign-on.
The plan is to roll out the new app at the beginning of 2025. “We’re working on the communication roll out and the website design,” he said, including an upcoming Read Green email. “There’ll be instructional videos on the website, so people can can go to the website and see how to set up their account and see how to reserve a space.”
Other parking issues
Parking has always been a challenge in Oakland, but the difficulties have changed and increased since the pandemic and since the O’Hara Parking Garage was torn down in 2020.
There are approximately 660 fewer parking spots on campus now than there were in 2019, Pearson said. And some of those spots are being used by people with full-week parking permit who only come to campus a couple days a week.
Those parking permits, as most who drive to campus know, are hard to come by. The current wait list includes several people who applied in 2016.
There also are people who put their permits on hold during the pandemic and haven’t reactivated them. The parking office uses some of those spots for the day-to-day parking, but can’t transfer those passes to other people without the original holder giving them up. Julie Bannister, assistant vice chancellor for auxiliary services, said they’re limited in what they can do with on-hold permits and those that are partially used, in part because of the new faculty union contract and the status quo period for the newly formed staff union.
“We’ve met with different consultants to see if there is something out there that we’re not thinking of,” she said. “We’re trying to communicate alternate ways to get to campus and understand it’s challenging, but we are constantly looking at different ways.”
For instance, at the beginning of the semester work at the OC Lot limited the number of cars that could park there. More shuttles were added from the Second Avenue parking lots near the Bridgeside Point buildings, “which was essentially a satellite parking pilot program,” Pearson said. “Unfortunately, over the two week period that those shuttles were running, we only had 10 riders.”
The office also has encouraged shared and set-day parking permits, which “haven’t been as successful as we had hoped when rolling this out.” These allow those who currently have permits to split use of a space with another permit holder or to only use the permit on specific days.
One Pitt staff member told the University Times that they received a ticket after their car was added to a colleague’s parking permit unofficially, while the colleague was out of town for a month. They were told that permits are non-transferable and cannot be used on cars that the permit holder doesn’t own.
Pearson said he had not heard of this scenario but said that one of the issues with this is that there might be pushback from people on the wait list. He said they’re “just trying to be fair across the University, regardless of relationships or position.”
What’s coming up?
The only new parking on campus in the past few years is at the Assembly Building, which is about 1.5 miles from the Cathedral of Learning and also has non-Pitt tenants. The new Fifth & Halket building will have 98 spaces when it opens, Pearson said, but doesn’t know when that will be.
Both Pearson and Bannister encouraged everyone to get involved with the Campus Master Plan process. Bannister said people need to make their voices heard in that process and let the planners know where they are commuting from and what the challenges are.
Pearson also said that Pittsburgh Regional Transit (PRT) is seeking input on its bus line redesign, which includes the Bus Rapid Transit system being built between Oakland and downtown Pittsburgh.
“Feedback is what’s going to drive their changes,” he said. “They’re looking at ways to better serve everyone. But obviously the feedback they could get from the Oakland community … could drive the need for more direct routes to Oakland from surrounding areas.”
PRT has had several engagement events and has more planned in the new year. There’s information about those meetings and an online survey available on the Bus Line Redesign website.
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.
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