Abstract
Campus transportation and parking are often treated as basic logistical services but at a university they shape much more than movement from one place to another. At the University of Virginia, students, faculty, staff, and Medical Center employees all depend on the same broader transportation environment that they all experience in different ways. Limited parking, permit costs, construction, bus reliability, walking distance, and campus layout are just a few of the factors that affect how people plan their days. These issues are especially important on a campus where academic buildings are arranged by school and are spread across Grounds. My thesis portfolio examines this larger problem from two directions. My technical project focuses on designing a software system that could help organize campus parking permit workflows. My STS research paper focuses on how UVA students and Medical Center-connected participants actually experience transportation and parking in daily life. Together, the projects show that campus mobility is not just a technical or administrative issue. It is also a sociotechnical problem shaped by both the physical limitations of the system and the people who use it.
My technical report describes the design and implementation of a full-stack campus parking management web application. The project was built with a Django backend, a MySQL relational database and an industry standard Model-View-Template architecture. The goal was to create a centralized system where users could submit parking permit requests and administrators could review, approve or deny those requests. The system used role-based access control so that standard users could only manage their own permit requests while administrators could access protected management functions. A major part of the project was designing the database schema to organize users, parking zones and permits and connect them through clear relationships. This helped prevent invalid records and made the workflow more reliable. To demonstrate the difference between local development and real-word use, the website was deployed and connected to a cloud infrastructure to handle the database and other backend functionality. The final result was a working prototype that demonstrated a complete system that could easily be adopted into the current network of UVa approved applications.
My STS research paper examined how UVA transportation and parking systems shape everyday mobility choices. The research question focused on how different methods of transporation (cars, buses, walking, etc) affect the end-users. The project used publicly available UVA transportation policy along with semi-structured interviews with twenty participants, including students and people connected to the Medical Center, to compare the anticipated versus actual use of these transporation methods. The main finding was that people often choose transportation based on predictability rather than speed alone. Walking was the most common primary transportation method among participants, not always because it was fastest, but because it was dependable. Scooters and bikes were also valued because they gave users control over timing. The bus system was useful when it worked smoothly but many participants were hesitant to rely on it due to inconsistencies with arrival times, route changes, or TransLoc information. Parking also created barriers with limited availability and expensive permits. Overall, the research found that UVA’s transportation system distributes inconvenience unevenly. Some users can absorb delays, costs, or uncertainty more easily than others while others must carefully plan around the system’s limits.
Together, these projects helped me understand campus parking and transportation as both a technical and social issue. The technical project showed how software can make a parking process more organized and transparent. The STS project showed why organization alone is not enough if users still experience uncertainty or unequal access. Future work could combine these lessons by improving transportation information systems. Based on the feedback gained though this research, standradzing bus routes by adding real-time updates and considering more affordable student parking options closer to central academic areas would lead to a noticeable improvement. The main value of this portfolio is that it connects implementation with user experience. A campus mobility system should not only function correctly on the backend, it should also reduce the everyday uncertainty that its users actually face.
