I recently visited Virginia Tech (note how Google shows Nidal Malik Hasan as #1 among the school’s “notable alumni,” a good reason to invest in PR…).
The school impresses the visitor with its NFL-grade football stadium, Four Seasons-grade hotel and conference center, and stone buildings (but the architecture school is a hideous concrete eyesore! (photos)). Due to the handsome stone construction, the school has some of the feel of Princeton, generally admired as one of America’s nicest college campuses. With 31,000 students Virginia Tech needs to be physically larger than Princeton, with 8,000 students. However, the physical inflation is more dramatic than the student ratio.
My theory is that Virginia Tech is spread out to a large extent because of the need to provide massive surface parking lots in front of most buildings, a requirement dictated by (a) the 100-year period of private ownership of non-self-driving cars, and (b) the expense of digging underground lots. It is tough to imagine casual collaboration among departments at Virginia Tech due to the long walks from subcampus to subcampus. Because the campus isn’t all that walkable, there is a huge amount of car traffic even after 9 pm on weekdays.
I’m wondering if once the self-driving (and shared) car (or RV) is here we will regret having built so many spread-out campuses to accommodate what turned out to be a relatively small fraction of the period of European settlement of the Americas.
Unfortunately, there still are no self driving cars. In the midst of 10 years of frantic corporate borrowing to buy out self driving car startups, it’s easy to forget not a single self driving car has ever been sold. Maybe it’ll happen after our lifetimes, but in the meantime all efforts will be focused on bailing out the massive overhang of corporate debt created since 2008.
I actually like the look of Cowgill Hall (architecture school building).
I really just can’t imagine shared self-driving cars replacing personal car ownership. I understand all the arguments about how cars waste most of their time parked and are inefficient. It is also technically inefficient for all of us to have personal computers (we could just share dumb terminals connecting to cloud services) and private homes that are empty for large chunks of the day. There are certain limited circumstances (migrant laborers doing shift work and sharing living quarters so they can send most of their money back to Mexico) where people are willing to share personal space, but most would prefer not to. For most people, their car is an extension of their personal space. A personal car embodies the freedom to go wherever, whenever.
Alex: Sign me up. We are a 2 car family. I can easily imagine becoming a one car family once self driving cars are here. I agree that we’d wish the freedom of being able to go wherever, whenever, but one car will cover that. There would be relatively rare times when we’d be happier using a shared (rented) car/truck/bus than owning it.
Even after they have self-driving cars for sale (probably at least a decade from now if not longer), it will take a while to “uber for self driving cars” up and running so you don’t need to own one and a self-driver will show up in your driveway in a few minutes. Modern cars run for a long time but depreciate fairly quickly – I have a 2009 minivan in my driveway which gets driven very little (moving daughter to college, when I need to transport between 5 and 7 people, trips to Home Depot) but it’s only worth around $7,000 so it doesn’t pay to sell it – I’ll probably keep it for another 5 years at least. Probably when self driving cars come in, the same thing will happen. So we are really looking at at least 15 years or 20 years or even more before the majority of cars are self driving.
So the “relatively short” heyday of the American private automobile will turn out to be more than a century at least – from the 1920s to the 2030s or 40s, which is longer than the heyday of the railroad.
Also if self driving cars become a real thing and you are on a spread out campus, it will be no big deal to summon one to take you across campus – possibly faster than it would take you to walk in an urban campus.
If you really wanted to make it easy to get around a campus you would put all the departments in giant high rise buildings so it’s a quick elevator ride to any other department – physics 7th floor, engineering 8th, math 9th, etc.. That’s what big banks, insurance companies, etc. do. But really college campuses are about show, not efficiency.
Alex: Interesting comments about efficiency. Consider the inefficient land use by churches (and their parking lots). Perhaps someone could start a sect (or modify one) to meet on Thursdays and rent other existing church facilities.
I think not. Buildings get redeveloped all the time. It’s an opportunity for overpriced union work to bring the campuses density back up.
My alma mater, the University of Maryland, started a redevelopment plan while i was a student in the early 2000s. Underground garages are super expensive, so they built above ground garages*. The freed up space was devoted to new dorms, academic buildings, and green spaces.
It’s a better campus than when I was a student.
*I remember an article int he student paper which said it cost $10K/parking space in the new garage. That was in 2002 or 2003.