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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.