We must talk about your parking regulations. In fact, we must mock them. In no other area of life do head spins quicker, and people’s opinions take on truly bizarre forms, than we we talk about parking. I get it, we are a culture obsessed with driving and parking. It’s part of nearly adult’s daily routine. In this episode, Tony Jordan of the Parking Reform Network and I have some fun with it, while also diving into the nitty-gritty of how to make change in your community.As a bonus, Tony describes some of the most bizarre, and most hilarious parking requirements he’s run across.Here’s a link to Donald Shoup’s article, “Roughly Right or Precisely Wrong.”Find more content on The Messy City on Kevin’s Substack page.Music notes: all songs by low standards, ca. 2010. Videos here. If you’d like a CD for low standards, message me and you can have one for only $5.Intro: “Why Be Friends”Outro: “Fairweather Friend”Transcript:Kevin K (00:00.92)
Welcome back to the Missy City podcast. This is Kevin Klinkenberg. Today we're going to talk about everybody's favorite topic, parking. The bane of my existence for most of my professional career, but we've got Tony Jordan here with us today from the Parking Reform Network. And I'm really looking forward to this conversation so we can get into the weeds a little bit on what's actually an incredibly important topic. So Tony, welcome.

Tony Jordan (00:28.617)
Thanks so much. Happy to be here.

Kevin K (00:31.064)
Well, it's a pleasure to have you. I ran into you in Cincinnati at the Strong Towns National Gathering and seeing you and we were chatting over a couple of beers and it just seemed like, you know, as soon as we start talking, it feels like, well, this probably should be a podcast. You know, we should spend more time getting into things. So I'm grateful you were able to make some time to be able to join. Tony, before we go too far, why don't we tell me what is the Parking Reform Network and how...

How long has it been around?

Tony Jordan (01:03.081)
the parking reform network is a, 501 C three organization that was founded, founded in the spring of 2019 and we launched in March of 2020. and it, yeah, it was actually okay for organizing a national organization because everything moved online. Like we, we, people were much more amenable to slacking and, using zoom calls, but we, the idea behind.

Kevin K (01:16.92)
Good timing.

Tony Jordan (01:33.641)
The need I saw, I had been doing parking reform locally in Portland, Oregon, where I'm from, or where I live, for years, helping to get rid of parking mandates that had been added back in and removing them entirely from the city and worked on upzoning projects too. And the whole while I really felt like one of the things that was missing in advancing parking reform was,

having an advocacy organization and a community that really was helping to educate the public and advance these policies. The practitioners and the city council even often knew that these policies were bad, the existing ones, but the public support wasn't there. So founding the Parking Inform Network, it's a community of practitioners, academics, activists, policymakers who...

We exist to kind of build a community and a movement around educating the public about parking policy and accelerating reforms. And we do that through a number of research and outreach and advocacy avenues.

Kevin K (02:47.352)
That's cool. So how did you, what was your background then getting into this? Were you in planning or transportation or talk a little bit about like how you came to this, to this spot.

Tony Jordan (02:57.641)
Yeah, I mean, I grew up in Los Angeles in San Pedro, the port of LA, and went to school at Santa Cruz and got a politics degree. And then I moved up to Portland and I mostly worked in tech for most of my career, web design, backend, server services programming. And I also, but I also did a couple, I worked at a couple of jobs as a labor organizer. So my background was not a