Brendan Downes
News Editor
According to Nate Wilson, who serves as Sewanee’s Domain Manager, the new parking infrastructure is aimed at maintaining Sewanee’s domain and tradition, along with the health of students, and practical issues faced by staff members who commute. Wilson offered insight into how new parking policies lay the groundwork for the future of the Domain.
Sewanee’s commitment to lowering carbon emissions is reflected in the new rule preventing students from driving during the day. Wilson mentioned the influx of vehicles on campus, noting that the number of registered student vehicles has increased annually since 2016.
Above all, Wilson wanted it to be known that these changes are a revival of Sewanee tradition and not a radical shift from the policies before the COVID-19 pandemic. “A lot of this is a reversion to the norm,” Wilson said. “Prior to Covid, there was no day time use of vehicles on campus.”
Wilson emphasized the importance of Sewanee’s walking and biking tradition while recognizing that campus culture took a hit following 2020. “Our parking and driving was kind of chaotic… there was very little regulation.” Wilson noted that students’ initial distrust of stricter parking policies was expected and understandable considering that no current students had the chance to experience pre-Covid Sewanee. “We hoped that the shuttle would soften the blow. I see the shuttle as a bridge,” said Wilson. The bike racks on the front of the shuttle were installed to encourage biking and to lighten the burden of walkers and bikers should there be rain or snow. “It’s intended to lower the bar to walking and biking. This is part of the way to ease the transition into the new system,” Wilson said.
Wilson talked at length about the importance of “outside time” for students’ mental and physical health. The Domain Manager reminisced on his adolescence spent in Europe without a car, using his personal experience as a comparison for what a more active Sewanee could look like. “By getting student parking under control… it reduces our carbon footprint, helps promote walking and biking, and I think it’s not said enough that… America is largely sedentary,” Wilson said.
Regarding the importance of accessible staff parking, Wilson cited a lack of parking spaces and too many student vehicles as issues that motivated the new parking infrastructure. “Our staff didn’t have any place to park because students were parking everywhere––we didn’t have room for any more parking on central campus and didn’t want to sacrifice anymore of [Sewanee’s] beauty to make room for cars on central campus,” Wilson said.
According to Wilson, it seemed like the necessary time to alter parking policies but also an opportune moment to reestablish the health and fitness norms that go hand in hand with the Domain.“All of that came together with the idea to begin moving students out to the periphery and reestablish the walking and biking culture that was here,” Wilson said. “[Students] are making habits, many of which [they] will carry through life, so from a pedagogical standpoint it makes sense for us to set the campus up [in a way] that sets [students] on a trajectory towards healthy habits going forward.”
But it was not just the growing number of student cars that prompted the change––previous organizational inconsistencies made keeping track of who was permitted to park in certain spots difficult. “We had not issued staff stickers since 2017, so everyone who left the university still had an active sticker… We had like 900 registered staff cars and we had no idea how many cars we actually had to serve,” said Wilson. “We are going to issue faculty and staff parking stickers next month… That will help us make decisions for how to improve parking even more next semester.”
When designing a more sustainable parking network, it became apparent to Wilson that students would be in a position to walk and bike more, but the new policies were not created to outright discourage students from bringing vehicles to Sewanee. “We are going to try to ‘net-win’ for everyone, so myself, the police chief, and folks from [Facilities Management] went to every parking lot and we reallocated spaces such that we had more faculty and staff parking, more handicap parking, and we had more student parking––we added about 250 student spaces.”
A considerable number of parking spaces were created for student use, yet students have come to Wilson with concerns about the distance of their assigned parking lot from their place of residence. Although he considers the new parking policies a success, Wilson did not shy away from detailing the ways in which adopting this new system proved challenging. He began by recognizing that the number of students bringing vehicles to school was larger than expected––this likely resulted from such a large freshman class. “We ended up with even more cars than we had anticipated and because of the late roll out we made some mistakes… there were some people who were [misplaced]. The process of using first come first serve was great until [students] started registering late and at the same time we started running out of parking places. Most of the horror stories come from that bucket.”
Drawing from data collected over the past few weeks, Wilson also concluded that they may have allocated too many parking spaces to faculty and staff.
Wilson attributed the late roll out of parking stickers to a failure of software. This new software which draws from registered vehicles to print student parking stickers failed to come online at the beginning of the semester. Issues with introducing this software have now been resolved according to Wilson.