Our readings this week focus on the Tragedy of the Commons, game theory, and social dilemma's. These topics interest me greatly and are brought up in the mathematics and computer science fields frequently. My focus with this post, however, is to hit a little closer to home for Bloomsburg University students.

Our student population has grown tremendously in the past few years, with large growth in incoming class size in the past 2 years. This has been accompanied new campus housing as well as multiple off-campus housing developments. One neglected area, however, has been parking.

Recently, Bloomsburg University sent out an email about this year's particularly poor parking situation. With just two commuter lots near campus and an increasing number of students who can be commuters (freshmen cannot so the large increase 2 years ago is just now hitting the commuter lots) coupled with increased off-campus housing opportunities has resulted in a large increase in commuter-status students. With such a large number of commuters (which is only growing year by year) and limited parking area, finding a parking space after the first classes of the day becomes extremely difficult. The universities answer? To remind and encourage drivers that there is a commuter lot on upper campus that usually has open spots and that students can get bussed from upper campus down to lower campus.

Obviously, nobody has listened to the email. Each driver, in trying to benefit himself or herself, still fervently tries to acquire a space at one of the closer commuter lots. If they find a spot, they have saved themselves much wasted time compared to driving further to upper campus and then being at the mercy campus busing. However, in the end, many of the students actually spend more time trying to find a spot, or end up having to pay costly tickets. This decision is something game theory would study, and the public parking (although only open to certain "public") can be studied as a resource utilized by the commons. The resource allocation scheme of over-scheduling utilized by the university is something that is interesting to look at from a statistical, moral (especially when parking is a privilege that is paid for), and economic perspective as well.

My question is this: is there a better way to manage the current parking situation besides reminding students there is an upper-campus lot and hoping that they listen? Even if this did work, it would end up disadvantaging the students who chose to listen even though they are the desirable students and the ones that allow the system to function. I think quite a few superior solutions could be formulated from the ideas of this week's readings as well as from the independent minds of my fellow classmates. Maybe the university bureaucrats should be taking this class instead!