Like most other campuses, Art Center has a parking problem. At peak times of the week, it is difficult to find enough legal parking space at our main campus. As Art Center rightfully prides itself on its Transportation Design program, we ought to be able to come up with our own creative solutions to solve a transportation issue. So, rather than spend capital on parking structures instead of improving our teaching facilities, what if we could offer our students, staff and faculty access to small footprint vehicles for their daily commute to school? Replacing a few hundred regular cars, which on average have a footprint of 90 square feet, with one or one-plus-one seat vehicles with a footprint of 30 square feet would free up significant parking spots. However, there are huge challenges to this simple sounding solution. How could we convince people to travel in such a small vehicle on streets full of SUV’s? What would the incentive to use them? How would we deal with vehicle construction and safety regulations. How would they be propelled and could they be designed with a very low ecological footprint too? How much would it all cost? Who would own and maintain them? What would the incentive be to an enterprise to build or supply them? What would the revenue stream look like? Intrigued with answering these questions, GradID and our small Advanced Mobility Research group have embarked on an ongoing research project to study small urban commuter vehicles that would help solve Art Center’s parking issues. Tempted as we designers always are, to solve the whole world’s problems with one solution, we decided that a better starting place would be to look at our own backyard first. While answering all the above questions requires complex, systems thinking, Art Center’s location give us a headstart. The prevailing climate is mild, year-round. The City of Pasadena is progressive in its mobility thinking. Pasadena based CalStart has specialist knowledge in alternative vehicles. There are other local institutions that have similar issues who could profit from the venture. Our goal is to propose a complete system that could see the light of day. Looking at the significant issues of designing and delivering small commuter vehicles that could be easily used by anyone with a regular driver’s license will be central part of the project. Our desire is to build some running prototypes with which we can get some valuable “customer” feedback on ergonomics, perceptions about safety and interfaces. We will be studying other vehicle architectures and concepts too. The images show Jason Hill, a Transportation Design undergraduate student, working on an ergonomic mock-up of one potential solution – a three-wheel, semi-enclosed vehicle, which would have a battery-electric drive train. Jason took a term out of his regular studies to work on the project as a research assistant.