Public Safety met this week with faculty, staff and students to discuss our disastrous parking situation on campus. There is not much that can be changed in terms of making new parking spaces without going up to higher levels of Bucknell, so Public Safety has partnered with ParkZen to create the app “Bison Park” for everyone on campus to be more aware of available parking spots on campus.
Bison Park works by crowd-sourcing information in the same way that Waze does to show you traffic on the roads, so it does not work unless people download the app (so there is a crowd to source from). Even if you are doubtful of the benefits of the app for you, your use of the app will be beneficial for other people. It is a free app, and the data is only used to provide up-to-date information about available parking on Bucknell’s campus.
The app is able to track when someone is moving in a car and where that car parks on campus. Once parked, the app will stop tracking your phone until you drive again. The app is also programmed to stop tracking your driving once you leave Bucknell’s campus, so its only use is parking on campus. This data is not accessible to Public Safety for individual vehicles, so it will not be used to enforce ticketing or monitor parking; it is only so that users can use the data to their advantage to find parking spots more easily. The app will suggest parking spots and even show you how to get there. For new drivers on campus, this, along with the fact that the app differentiates between staff and student parking, will be really helpful for finding parking spots where you won’t get ticketed.
Right now, there are not enough users of the app to see the benefits because, with a couple thousand parking spots and less than a hundred users, there is no way to tell which parking spots are in use and which are not. Public Safety is listening to our concerns and trying to move forward with proposals to improve parking at Bucknell. A way to help them do that is by having this app downloaded to make small changes to how we use the parking that we already have. This can also provide data on which lots are used most at different times of day and where people prefer to park, to give an idea of where the best addition of a parking lot could be if that is ever an option for us.
If we ever want to see big changes in terms of parking at Bucknell, we need to go along with and really lean into the small changes to prove that change is worth it. If we aren’t willing to work together towards a parking solution that will be more helpful then it will never come. Downloading this app is a small step, but any movement towards better parking at Bucknell is something we should all be interested in and support in any way that we can. Look for information in your emails from Chief Morgan about how to set up the app; our use of the app will be worth it and make positive changes on campus.