Editor, the Gauntlet,
I have always been of the impression that the reason we had the UPass here at the University of Calgary was since ours was a commuter campus and there are not nearly enough parking spaces for all those students who would like to drive every day. The UPass is a great alternative that allows students to simply drive to their nearest Park-n-Ride and hop on a bus or train straight to campus, free parking. The city’s proposed $3 Park-n-Ride fee would put an end to that situation and could conceivably endanger the future of the UPass here at the U of C. For an extra $0.75 a day I know a lot more students will abandon the C-Train in favour of parking right on campus. That could potentially cause an infrastructure problem in the form of lack of parking and will most certainly cause the U of C to dramatically increase parking fees here on campus.
I do not see that in this day and age where the public dialog is so aimed at improving access to public transit the City of Calgary would impose such a heavy user fee onto it’s citizens that will inevitably increase the number of cars on the roads. It is time for city council to stop being so reactionary and begin to do it’s job. Responsible zoning is the place to begin, if the city was designed around proper thorough ways instead of closed neighborhoods and if urban sprawl was not so rampant, the city’s transit system wouldn’t be so difficult to manage. Which really begs the question, why do we keep electing the same council members again and again?