David McIntyre, one of September’s Buildings & Grounds guest bloggers, leads the institutional practice for Vanasse Hangen Brustlin Inc., a consulting firm specializing in transportation, development, and the environment.

My personal and professional life collided recently. By an admittedly rough estimate, some five million cars have returned to campuses throughout the country in the past few weeks, and a couple of them were mine.

While their student users are in class, cars collectively occupy some 60 square miles of campus space, most of this being land allocated for parking. Back them up end to end (a common occurrence on many campuses these days) and these cars would stretch over halfway around the globe, or from Boston to Berkeley and back again—twice. Arrange them side by side (a common occurrence on the roads leading to campuses) and they would cover metropolitan Washington.

I was bringing two students back to two colleges, so I did not park my cars on the campuses permanently. One campus is in the exurbs—small and leafy, with surface lots located 40 feet from the LEED-certified student housing. Apparently this was not close enough, as arriving students drove over the 40-foot lawn to empty their cars directly onto the front steps of the dorm. They then moved the cars to the surface lot, to be parked there free for the balance of the year.

The second campus is in a dense urban area. Cars and trucks were triple-parked in the narrow urban streets, and students teamed up to empty the cars into their building within a prescribed period—or else. Local police were ticketing, and the tow trucks had 30 people on their waiting list. Parking at this institution is expensive—it’s market-rate—so most students opt out of having a car. Access to transit helps.

The experiences could not have been more different—for me, and I suspect for the students. As I was triple-parked and queued up to unload as dad-in-waiting, I mused about how these experiences shape our behavior and attitudes as we move on in life after graduation.

My colleagues and I think about cars—and transportation and infrastructure generally—for colleges and universities. We work with numbers and behavior. The numbers part is generally simple enough, though the ground is shifting as gas prices influence choices. The behavior part is far more complex.

Does the student who drives up to the front steps of the dorm do so because this is what she does at the retail shopping strip? Does the campus share the development form of a regional mall, where free parking is provided in surface lots surrounding the core to encourage an auto-free pedestrian environment? Does this make the food court in the mall analogous to the campus quad? Does the urban student forgo bringing his car back to college solely because of the cost, or is something else at work in this decision?

Providing parking is a choice, not an obligation. I had that thought in mind when a tap on the window told me to move. I moved on and found a spot and parked. —David McIntyre