With Camosun opening the doors to the new Alex & Jo Campbell Centre for Health and Wellness at the Interurban campus this month, there is excitement brewing for everyone. The building has a sleek design and room for more intensive and specialized classrooms and, of course, a lot of students. This means that Interurban, which has long been the source of parking concerns for students, is going to need more parking.
When the designs for the new building were first created in 2017, the plans included a new parking lot with, according to the original website, 195 parking spaces. The end number is actually 233 (plus two accessibility stalls and one elder stall), a welcome increase. (The total number of parking spaces at Interurban before the new parking lot was 1149, not including short-term, PISE, loading spaces, motorcycle, or elder spaces; that number is now 1384.) Parking is always a problem at Interurban, so the additional spaces should be a cause for celebration. However, parking is parking, and with new students attending classes at this new building, traffic is going to get even more congested than it has been in previous years.
But Camosun can only do so much. Saanich council has a say in how many parking spaces the college can put in. But good news for students: the college managed to work with Saanich to get more parking spots than initially proposed. Camosun manager of transportation and parking Maria Bremner says that the college feels the new parking spaces will be enough to accommodate students.
“Any time you come up with an estimate, it’s an estimate based on existing travel habits and patterns,” says Bremner. “We do feel it will be adequate, but, that said, the nuances of people’s transportation decisions within the program area that’s migrating to Interurban, diving into that as sort of a demographic, it remains to be seen. We know that at any given time on campus, there will be about 600 new people, students and staff.”
Bremner knows that driving isn’t the only means of transportation, saying that a “significant majority” of Camosun students take transit and other ways to get to campus.
“So, yes, overall, we feel optimistic and reasonably confident that it’s going to be adequate, although there will definitely be, without a doubt, parking pressures,” she says. “There is existing parking pressures before the new building came online, and we don’t anticipate seeing a significant reduction in parking demand this school year.”
Interurban has always been a challenge to deal with. There’s its location, and there’s its limited parking spaces, which are always an issue when students are struggling for a spot. However, the college has added not only more spots, but also more variety, with one elder stall, two accessibility zones, six electric vehicle charging stations, and 10 carpool stalls. Along with 42 staff spaces and 174 student spaces, the parking lot—located behind the new building—is, no doubt, massive.
But this is a parking lot made for a new building, which means an influx of students for the new year. Do the numbers balance out?
Camosun College Student Society (CCSS) external executive Fillette Umulisa thinks that the additional space won’t provide enough room for the students that are already there, never mind accomodating all the students moving from Lansdowne to Interurban to go to the new building.
“I think pretty much everybody knows this, but Interurban has had parking challenges before, when the building was built,” says Umulisa. “And I don’t think the 200 spots that we’re adding as part of the construction will meet the needs of the staff, faculty, and students who have been going to Interurban.”
Interurban faces not just parking issues, but also transportation issues in general.
“Interurban is in a challenging zone from a transportation perspective,” says Bremner. “Unlike Lansdowne campus, which benefits from being in the shadow of the Royal Jubilee Hospital, UVic, and a bigger urban area, Interurban is a little bit more isolated. As a consequence, we don’t have as much transit service out to that campus, and it’s a further distance to reasonably walk or cycle. In a sort of transportation planning perspective, your ideal cycle commute… is generally around five kilometres, and Interurban campus ranges between seven to ten kilometres for a lot of people, and if you’re on the West Shore, obviously more.”
Umulisa says that it’s an inconvenience for students to have to drive five kilometres to Interurban and then not be able to find any parking.
“For Interurban, it’s very isolated. It’s kind of far… which gives them really no choice but to drive,” says Umulisa. “There’s three schools on that campus, and that’s a lot of students, and then there’s staff, and everybody else. So I have heard that usually there’s not enough parking, and I suppose they can take buses, but that can delay [the students] and staff. Now that they’re moving a whole other school there, and have only added 200 spots, somehow I feel like it’s not going to be enough.”
First year Nursing student Emma Jacob is pleased with the new building, but not with the campus’ parking.
“I take the bus in the morning,” she says. “It’s about 30 minutes to bus there from where I park. I would rather drive, but the parking is too expensive and the parking lot fills up really early in the morning and there aren’t enough spots left.”
Some Interurban students have no complaints about parking, because they don’t drive, like first-year Arts and Science student Thorben Stau, who has more trouble with the commute to Landowne than the commute to Interurban.
“The problem is, my homestay is 50 minutes away from the Lansdowne campus, so it’s pretty far away because three of the classes are Lansdowne,” says Stau. “That’s the only problem, but overall, it’s good.”
Bremner says that it’s important to approach transportation problems by thinking holistically.
“There’s not a silver bullet to transportation and parking problems,” she says. “Whenever I look at transportation, it’s not just a matter of a number of cars on the road or in our parking lot, but it’s a result of other socio-economic and regional aspects that are going on, such as what’s the most affordable place to live, and students have to consider, ‘Do I have to get to work or pick up my kids after class?’ Do people feel like they live in a safe and walkable community? How comfortable and familiar are they using alternative transportation? I think a lot of those aspects feed into people’s transportation decisions, and that’s the approach we take into consideration.”
While Camosun advocates alternative methods of transportation, for many students, biking or walking to Interurban would be basically impossible. That’s why Camosun has started the Park and Ride/Park and Walk program. With several parking areas provided outside of the Interurban campus, located at Tillicum, Wildwood Outdoor Living Centre, and the Saanich Baptist Church, Bremner is greatly encouraged by the growing popularity of the program.
“I think from what we’ve seen so far, from what we’ve seen from the Park and Ride/Park and Walk program, I’m very optimistic,” says Bremner. “Cumulatively we have about 70 stalls of Park and Ride/Park and Walk for students, and they’re for students only, not for staff. That provides free parking in areas that provide ready access to other transportation solutions, such as jumping on a transit bus to get to campus, having a relatively flat and easy cycle commute, or having a realistic walk within 20 minutes or less. So I feel very positive and optimistic about the Park and Ride program. We’ve already had a significant number of students register and we haven’t even really started marketing that program yet.”
Umulisa says that the Park and Ride program is going to benefit those who can use it.
“I think that is going to help,” she says. “It’s good that we have parking somewhere that’s not on campus. It can go halfway and park at Tillicum, but then again, it would be more convenient if that parking space was available on campus. It’s still good.”
For students who don’t benefit from off-campus parking, Bremner suggests using the Camosun Express shuttle bus, which drives from Lansdowne to Interurban on a recently updated schedule including stops in Royal Oak and the West Shore.
“The Express improvements on the schedule we had this year was a direct result from our research for the new Transportation Demand Management Plan that the college has. It’s a five-year plan with the primary goal of providing convenient, environmentally responsible, and affordable access to both of our campuses, and a key aspect of that plan and that research was looking at how we can improve the Express,” she says. “I’m really excited about the West Shore commuter service that we’re bringing online. Roughly 25 percent of our students come from the West Shore, and this provides a very efficient way for them to get to and from campus at the beginning and end of the day.”
Umulisa believes that the best solution is to see how the parking lot affects students first-hand.
“I was talking to my colleagues, and we are really hoping that the college will be monitoring the parking situation during the first week, because that’s going to be a critical part of this whole thing,” says Umulisa. “Everybody’s new and trying to get to this campus. And if there are any concerns, I feel like they should remediate and look for solutions. Students do not have a choice but to drive to Interurban sometimes, especially when they have early-morning classes. Buses run about every 20 minutes, and that really does not help at all.”
However, Camosun has heard and responded to these critiques of the buses.
“Scheduling improvements, like having the [Camosun Express] bus arrive earlier in the day [to] allow a bit more flexible time before class started for both staff and students, was one of the recommendations we heard, as well as more continuous service throughout the week, so we enhanced our Friday schedule,” says Bremner. “We extended the hours that it operates, having a later departure time as well for people, and also, on the campus-to-campus shuttle, added a stop for the Royal Oak exchange, which helps to diversify commuting options for people, so whether they’re choosing the Park and Ride program that’s available at the Royal Oak area, or whether they’re using the BC [Transit] routes to come from other parts of the region, such as the Saanich Peninsula, we think that that will really provide a more convenient option.”
A brand-new building with a brand-new parking lot might not change the future of the campus, but it might provide a lot of relief for students who always get shortchanged when pulling into a parking lot spilling over with cars. There are plenty of solutions, but these solutions can only work if the students can use them. Camosun has certainly responded to students’ concerns; otherwise, it wouldn’t have added a parking lot that reaches the maximum number of spaces permitted by Saanich, set up off-campus parking, or changed the Camosun Express schedules to suit students’ needs. But, keeping night classes in mind, will the new schedule run late enough? Are the off-campus spaces going to transport the students in time? How is the school going to respond when the new parking lot is overrun with students?
We can only guess what will happen, and our prior experiences with the school will affect what we think of the new parking lot available to us. To some, this might be the dream scenario, but to others, it might make more room for disaster.