I’m generally always one to look at the bright side of life while riding a bicycle, and it was with this cheerful mindset that I took this photo at UNM last Wednesday around 10:00 A.M.

It was only when I got home as the post-bike ride glow waned that I noticed in the photo background…

Yes, the dreaded shuttle and its forlorn occupants who drive from their homes to parking lots on the other side of Lomas Blvd., sit/stand on/near a bench waiting for a shuttle bus, get in the shuttle bus, are transported barely above walking speed from the bench across Lomas to, in this case, the turn-around at Dane Smith Hall just south of Las Lomas, and thereafter forced to walk (oh, how awful that must be!) the 100 ft. to Dane Smith or even further distance to that first class of the day.

Truly one of my least favorite sights in Albuquerque. A failure in so many ways, the photobombing shuttle victims got me thinking about how we got here. So I took a look, once again, at the wonderful, yet agonizingly incomplete set of historical aerial maps housed at the City website.

Back in 1959, the area from Lomas Blvd. alongside UNM North Course looked like this:

By 2018, the same area looked like this:

In short, instead of building student housing, multi-family structures in particular, planners went with parking lots and shuttle buses. The importance of planning where to put UNM students and how they got to campus in the 1950s was sharply elevated by a spike in main campus enrollment, going from about 5,000 in 1956 to almost 20,000 by 1968.

The spike in enrollment accompanied the big boom in overall area population, with BernCo (using County numbers because of City annexations during the period) going from 69,391 in the 1940 Census to 262,199 by 1960. As anyone who has visited some/all of the many, many, many subdivsions sprawltastically splattered around town knows, students and all others were encouraged to live at a Dale Bellamah (and other developers) place far from UNM and drive everywhere.

So that’s what happened and today we continue to live with it. Capitalism is like that. With the more social engineering lens of roadway planning, however, how would Lomas Blvd. have developed differently as part of UNM if significantly more housing existed on both sides of the stroad? While Lomas and Yald Blvd. is an extremely important walker/roller crossing today, what would it look like with much greater numbers of non-drivers using it? What other multi-modal crossing might be in place between University Blvd. and Yale on Lomas, and how much more traffic calming might have resulted from its crazy stroad status today?

It’s interesting to note that the drivers parking at the shuttle lots and being bussed across Lomas could walk almost as quickly from the lots. Your humble blogger sees a significant number of UNMH employees in scrubs making the walking trek, but my sense is the ratio of students doing so is quite low. I’d like to say I note this in a non-judgmental way, but that would be a lie. In similar not-so-bright-side-of-life thinking, I’m again reminded that I’ve been told more than once that the University of New Mexico isn’t in the education business, it’s in the parking and real estate business.

Strong evidence for how lucrative parking is for the University can be found at the UNM Parking and Transportation System (PATS) webpages for its shuttle system, “Designed for rapid and convenient campus travel, PATS’ transportation system is a comprehensive transit network, offered free of charge (webpage emphasis) to UNM students, staff, faculty, and visitors” The PATS’ pages include a real-time interactive shuttle system map app/webpage that surely isn’t free, merely added on to the cost of a parking permit (via the website’s “Parking Portal,” I get $210 as price for a one-year permit).

It was nice that I was able to take a photo with about a dozen bikes at a single bike rack at UNM, one of many scattered all over campus, north and south of Lomas. I salute each and every one of those cycling to the University, especially if they crossed Lomas Blvd. to do so. The ratio of those victims fleeing the shuttle bus in the photo above versus the dozen or so bikes is less nice. And there’s a reason we are left with less nice. And that reason also helps to explain why crossing Lomas Blvd. at UNM still continues to be a death-defying act in 2023.