There’s nothing wrong with OSU-Cascades students and visitors parking on the street near campus unless it’s:

Creating a safety and congestion problem.

Dumping parking on the street with a flawed parking plan.

Then, there’s everything wrong with it.

And that’s what OSU-Cascades has done.

Almost any college campus has parking issues. OSU-Cascades tried to be different. It aimed for a dreamy “paradigm change in our single-occupancy travel culture.” The parking plan called on students and faculty to get out of their cars and walk, bike, carpool or take the bus.

That’s what colleges do. Dream up new ways the world might work. But wishful thinking is not a strategy. And things will get worse when snow and ice make the roads slippery and walking and biking less attractive.

The school also wounded its credibility recently by giving a semblance of validity to a self-selected survey of how students and staff get to campus. That’s the standard for reliable data at OSU-Cascades?

There’s a pile of academic literature about parking, especially by UCLA professor Donald Shoup. In part, Shoup champions the idea of encouraging people not to use cars. How? Charge for parking. The OSU-Cascades parking plan clings to that fascination of getting people out of cars, despite the reality of free parking on the street.

The city of Bend is complicit in this, too. The city’s plan is to wait until things get worse, though city staff put it more diplomatically.

Some day, OSU-Cascades will expand. That will be a great day for Central Oregon. It will be even better if the school and the city are realistic about parking.