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C00002 00002	MAKING STANFORD A BETTER PLACE TO LIVE
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MAKING STANFORD A BETTER PLACE TO LIVE


	Stanford University  is not as good a place to live as it could be.
Relative to the technology and prosperity of the nineteen seventies, it is
not as good a place to live and work as it was when the university was
established.  In my opinion, this is mainly due to certain popular but
mistaken ideas.  Shortage of funds has contributed, of course, but the
funds that have been spent could have been spent better, and the funds
expected as part of the Campaign for Stanford could be spent better than
they will be if the published plans are carried out.

	Here are the main complaints:

	1. There are no good places to eat on campus, either for lunch or
for dinner.  As a community of 20,000, Stanford can support many good
eating places.  In fact, it does. they just aren't on the campus.
A consequence of this is that social life is fragmented by the need to
go a substantial distance to get a good meal.

	2. Stanford is more hostile to the automobile than the surrounding
communities.  Prevalent ideology (see the SWOPSI report \F1Balanced
Transportation Planning for Suburban and Academic Communities) proposes
that Stanford become even more hostile.
This hostility has the following subtle but definite harmful consequence:

	To come to Stanford by automobile or to go from one part of
Stanford to another is a bigger deal than it is in other communities of
the same size.  The result is to isolate Stanford from other communities
and to isolate the parts of Stanford from each other.  This isolation
is compounded of thousands of individual decisions that it is too much
trouble to go to a seminar or to visit a colleague in another department.
No amount of moralistic propaganda to the effect that people should
be grateful for the exercise of walking or bicycling will affect this.

	3. Stanford lacks the shops and services that a community of its
size normally has.  This is a real inconvenience especially for the
less mobile members of the community such as children or students
without cars.  The services that do exist enjoy monopolies, and
take full advantage of the power that monopoly gives of running an
organization for the convenience of its executives and employees rather
than for the convenience of its customers.

	4. When Stanford was founded, it was possible to walk or bicycle
anywhere in the academic area without getting wet in the winter or
overheated in the summer.  Modern Stanford makes no provision for the
covered walkways of yesteryear.

	Here is a proposal for relieving many of these ills.  Build a
commercial center in the present Tresidder parking lot.  This commercial
center should have space enough for more than the number of services that
are determined to be required.  In the first place, the planners will
not anticipate all the requirements, and in the second place, there should
be enough space so that there can be rival purveyors of the same service.

	Underneath the commercial center should be parking for 5000 to
10,000 cars.  According to the SWOPSI report parking space costs about
$2000 per vehicle in a modern parking structure.  A parking space for
every student would require a capital cost of about $22,000,000 which
is small compared to the $300,000,000 that Stanford is currently trying
to raise.

	If it were technically feasible, it would be better to put the
parking underneath the Quad.  Then the academic areas would be better
accessible to students, faculty and visitors.  The possibility should
be explored but it probably isn't feasible without a large advance
in the technology of construction.

	Something should be done to improve the roads into the campus
to eliminate the mysteries, jams, and general unpleasantness of driving
on the campus.

	The system of covered walkways at surface level should be extended
throughout the campus, and the roads that have to be crossed should
go into cuts and perhaps even covered over a major part of their length.

	The financial plan for the commercial center should be based on
recovering the costs from rentals to commercial establishments.  An
alternate plan is to have a commercial developer do the whole job.

	The cost of the improved parking might be met by parking fees.
but I don't see much advantage in it, because the demand for parking
is rather inelastic, and almost all the potential customers already
have a financial relation to Stanford.  Certainly it would be silly
to charge faculty and staff.  If you charge them for parking, then
you have to pay them more to make working at Stanford equally attractive
compared to Stanford's competitors in the job market.  In fact, the
additional amount you have to pay is more than you get from the parking,
because they would have to pay income tax on the additional pay while
parking is considered a normal perquisite of employment.  Charging students
for parking has more merit, because not all of them have cars, and
making a separate charge for parking rather than including the right
in the tuition makes it easier for a student to attend Stanford on an
austere budget.

	Let me make clear the ideological differences with the SWOPSI
report.  First, that report assumes that salaries and tuition charges
are arbitrary and ought to be adjusted to achieve the greatest justice
in some sense.  They also seem to have an image of the typical student
as working stiff from a minority group, the typical staff member as
an underpaid culinary worker, and the typical faculty member as a
middle aged prosperous full professor who has nowhere else to go.
It has been my experience that what Stanford pays faculty and staff
is dictated more by Stanford's position in the job market than by
any considerations of what various groups ought to be getting.  This
has resulted in very uneven salary scales which is not necessarily
bad at the upper levels of pay but which can lead to hardship
at the lower levels.  In fact, pay is much more even at the lower
levels.

	Another major difference concerns one's attitude towards the
automobile.