(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 558: Parking Reform with Tony Jordan

This week we’re joined by Tony Jordan, President of the Parking Reform Network at the Mpact Transit + Community conference in Portland. We talk about getting rid of our cars, the arbitrary requirements for parking around the country, and Donald Shoup’s legacy.

Listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA.

Or catch this and all other episodes in the Libsyn archive.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript of the show:

Jeff Wood: Tony Jordan, welcome to the Talking Headways podcast.

Tony Jordan: Thanks for having me, Jeff.

Jeff Wood: Well, thanks for being here. Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

And then they called me and said, nah, it’s not the transmission, so you’re not gonna have to pay for that, but we need you to put a computer chip in here and ride around for a couple days. And then they said, we think it’s the computer. You know, that will cost $2,000. And I said, okay. And then he said, no, actually it’s not the computer.

You don’t have to pay for that. We think it’s an engine rebuild, $2,000. And I said, wait. Now I was just gonna spend $2,000 on the transmission, no questions asked. If I paid $2,000 for the engine rebuild, the transmission’s gonna go out. So I said, I’m gonna put the car in the garage for six months and we’re gonna use Zipcar and take the bus and see if it works.

And so we did that and then sold the car for $2,000 six months later. And really never looked back. I used Zipcar for a while pretty heavily, but I haven’t driven probably in three years now.

Yeah, certainly. But I have not driven a car probably in two to three years. Oh my gosh. Yeah.

They were like, it’s your transmission. And, and I could feel it. I had a stick shift. So I was like, okay, first gear is not working quite right. I have to go to second to start, and it’s kind of tough. And so they were like, oh yeah, $2,000. Exactly, exactly the same. And, and I was like, I think I looked up the value of the car and it’s like $2,000 as well.

And I was like I just this is that right After like, I think Uber started to, and I had Zipcar and I had my bike and I had. San Francisco Transit. And so I decided to sell it. But the funny part about selling it was I put it on Craigslist and this guy from Denver messages me, I had a 1999 Volkswagen Jetta, and this guy from Denver messages me and he says, I wanna buy your car.

And I was like, okay, but you’re in Denver. And he’s like, it’s okay. So he flies from Denver to Oakland, takes Bart over to my place, and I’m like, you wanna test drive? He’s like, yeah, sure. And I was like, well, it’s kind of hilly. First gear doesn’t work. You know, I said that in the ad too. He’s like, it’s okay.

So I was like, fine. And so he drove it around for about five, 10 minutes and he is like, okay, this is great. And I was like, are you sure? And he’s like, yeah. And I was like, okay, well, uh, you know, 2000, $2,000. And he’s like, okay. He hands over a wad of cash, $2,000. And I was like, alright, it’s yours. So I went and did the title thing and all that stuff.

And then fast forward a number of years later and I just like, okay, bye-bye car. A number of years later, and I find the title transfer in like my folder or something. I’m throwing out files and so I’m like, oh, I see the guy’s name, and I just like, oh, I Google this guy’s name. Well, it turns out he got like the same year and probably using my car, he got in trouble for siphoning water off of somebody’s property in Humboldt County to grow wheat.

So he got thrown in jail, this guy, after he bought my car, and I guess the reason why he went to Oakland was because they’re a little bit more lenient about their weed policy as well. Uhhuh. So my car ended up being like I guess a drug mule of some sort,

Then I figured I was $4,000 up and I, you know, that changed how I thought about getting around. And, um, yeah, I raised two kids with no car and I don’t miss it. I try to drive as little as possible.

Yeah. And was totally down for the experiment. My son was only two, so he had nothing to say about it. I think now my son does have a driver’s license, but I think he, he gets it, you know, he’s frustrated with bad transit service and other options, but it also, he understands that driving is kind of. Yeah, like, you know, when he took his driver’s test, he’s like, this is, it’s kind of crazy that people can do this.

They drive around and my, you know, my daughter, it’s a little different ’cause she’s a young woman and she has more personal safety concerns, which are starting to come up now where she’s doing more things at night and people might lear at her or people are falling her around. And so that, that’s a, that is a different thing.

And I think we think about threat vectors and what, what’s threatening us? And I always just try to say like, I understand this and of course I’m concerned for your safety. Driving everywhere is not the solution to that. Right. Yeah. That’s endangering a bunch of other people and still yourself.

So like it’s not really on the table for us to be doing that. So I think there’s some frustration, but my kids are extremely independent. Yeah. And um, I think that helps. They teach other classmates how to take the bus and I encourage anyone to try and raise their kids. Without driving them around. Saves you a lot of time too.

For sure.

So she’s like super excited to take the J or take the bus. I wanna know what got you interested in this in the first place? Like what started this hop? Was it when you were a little kid? Was it when you were older? Like what was the impetus for being interested in cities and transportation, but then Yes.

And then parking.

I left LA ’cause I felt kind isolated like I was. I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was 19, so I didn’t drive around at all as a teen. I don’t think I really knew about cities that much. I wasn’t really onto it till I, I moved to Portland 2002 and then within the few years, you know, you start to kind of walk a bit more, understand a bit more, and really, you know, getting rid of my car in 2008 kind of set me along the path.

But ultimately it was a blog post on a website called Meta Filter. Old school internet. Yeah. The post was called The High Cost of Free Parking, and it was just some links about Donald Shoup’s work. I don’t even know if it linked to his book, but I looked into it, I clicked on it. I’m a curious person, and I had my wife.

It was only hardcover book at the time, so it was a little harder to get, she got it from interlibrary loan to the university and I started reading it and that really, I mean, it really was. I read the whole thing. I started talking about I would never stop. I’d never shut up. Like, I mean, it was like really?

I just like, I was so. Don Shoup asked me one time like, what did you think when you read the book? And I said I felt like I was kind of like reading Upton Sinclair’s the Jungle and eating a hamburger. Like I look around, we’re just a couple blocks from a building. I used to work in the Fox Tower here in Portland, overlooks the city owned parking garage.

I live across the street from a parking lot for a bar and none of that ever registered to me. And then I read this book and all of a sudden it was like, wow. Like why, how? Why doesn’t anyone know? And that really kicked me off into learning a lot more about urbanism and cities. But it really just started with kind of having my eyes open to how much parking there is and really seeing it for the cost and the space that it takes up and understanding, like self-inflicted it wasn’t like a natural thing.

We, we, we did this to ourselves.

And so after I have a kid, I see the kids now, like they’re visible to me more than they were before. And so I feel like that’s kind of the same thing. You see the parking and the infrastructure that we built for it everywhere once you kind of get Shoup pilled.

It’s double insulting because you’re not only, you’re seeing the damage it’s done to the city, but then you’re like, I’m paying for all this too. Yeah. And I’m not using it. And so I think that helps too. You’re definitely more fertile ground for getting Shoup pilled if you’re not a regular driver, because I think just the injustice of, man, I’m unwillingly supporting this and I don’t really have a choice, makes it even tougher.

Yeah.

And then everywhere else is like a wash in this parking. And even those places where parking is actually congested, it’s underpriced and Undermanaged. And we got here, I think, I don’t even know if it was nefarious, professor used to say, like in his book. If you asked Henry Ford to design like the way to sell these cars, you would do, I think it was just.

We started building freeways. Cars started coming into communities. The local business folks and politicians started kind of freaking out, and they said, okay, in our downtowns, maybe we’re gonna build a parking garage or two, or a parking lot, but everywhere else we’re gonna solve this problem by just requiring that if you build a house or you start a business, or you change a building into a new business, you’re gonna have to put a certain number of off street parking spaces.

Minimum parking requirements or parking mandates. And they started setting these in the zoning code. And they were probably based on local observation or depending on what planners showed up that you hired, but they’re arbitrary. We have these arbitrary requirements all across the country. It really shows, stands out when you look regionally at them.

Did a survey of parking requirements near the capital of Connecticut, just the region there. And my favorite examples is bowling alleys. You’ll find, uh. One city has two parking spaces per lane. One city has eight per lane, and literally in this region I found 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. In between right, you will find a spread for these land uses.

And so it really shows their arbitrary. And anyone who’s worked in zoning and advocacy knows it’s really hard to change zoning code. It’s complicated. It’s also very political, especially with parking. So these kind of stagnated and the impact of that is that every one of these parking spaces we require, we wanna build an apartment.

You need one and a half to two parking spaces. Okay. If that’s a surface lot, it takes up space three to 400 square feet that you could be putting more building on. If you say, oh, well, let’s put it, you know, in a parking structure, those parking structures, nowadays a space costs 40, $50,000. You wanna put it underground, it’s gonna.

Make 50% or a hundred percent more of that cost, and a $40,000 parking space adds $400 a month to the rent. You add all this together and it’s kind of like, wow, we really screwed up. Just go to Google Maps and look and look at a place that was built before 1950 and a place that was built after 1950.

Especially commercial development, and you see what happened. I don’t think it had to happen that way, but I think especially for shopping centers, like if your city has a code that says a, a pet store has a different parking requirement than a furniture store, and you want to be able to lease a building to a pet store or a furniture store, you need to have enough parking that you can cover either of those, otherwise you can’t.

And we have shopping centers around the country right now that were built after the war. That still, I’ve talked to shopping center owners that have empty storefronts that they can’t lease because the city says no. If you put a restaurant in there, it doesn’t work with your mix. So I think that’s like, when I got into this, I started talking to people and they were like, parking.

I’m like, no, you, you don’t know. Like this is totally. It’s totally crazy and I think that it actually is really accessible. It’s really easy if you understand how much it costs, how much space it takes up, and how stupid the rules are. And then just show just look at a overhead map. Why does, why can you fit all of downtown Fayetteville in a space that is in a parking lot two miles away?

Right? Like I, I’ll just show those. I’m like, you could fit this whole downtown in the Olive Garden parking lot. And you have two restaurants that take up the same space as a downtown with 40 restaurants. And I’ll joke, cheesecake Factory, he’s got a big menu, but it can’t, it can’t compete with a whole city’s downtown.

Options of menus, you know? So it’s a lot of this is choice. Can we buy more choices,

Bar parking requirements are pretty high. They’re usually around one parking space for every 50 or a hundred square feet. So you’re looking at a parking lot that’s gonna be three to eight times bigger than the building. And what they do is they prevent a bunch of bars from being able to go in in a row.

You can’t put four bars in a row. You can’t create a bar hopping scene. There’s just not enough space. So you can open a new bar at the edge of the city with a big parking lot, or you can find a place in a storefront in the downtown, and you can apply for a variance to open a bar. And this allows the city to kind of have a, an acceptable but arbitrary reason to deny, and I, I think, can lead to corruption, right?

You know, someone has to ask someone for a favor, but it also, in the case of housing or other businesses, it does provide a way to prevent housing or things from being built. So it’s kind of just like this arbitrary fake zoning excuse that can be used for almost anything, particularly the bars. Like land uses that are less desirable sometimes seem like they’d have a higher parking requirement.

And that’s, I think, so that they can’t be concentrated. You know, it’s like a backwards way of doing it.

So actually the first thing I did after I read Shoup’s book was I looked at the zoning code and it was like, oh, Portland was pretty much ahead of the game. We had pretty good policy, so I was kind of disappointed. There wasn’t really anything to super go agitated about. But then two years later, they started building a bunch of apartments with no parking on a street called Division Street here, and the neighbors freaked out and then the city started proposing that they were gonna add parking mandates back.

And so I was like, I read this book. I had worked as a union organizer in the past, so I went down to planning commission. I testified I saw some other people who were in support of what I thought. Not adding parking requirements, but they were not organized. They didn’t have a mailing list they were just a couple people, random folks.

And so I set up a mailing list and organized testimony, and we lost the city added parking mandate specs. And then they, they appointed me to some committees and I was on the committees and then. About 20 15, 20 16, I said, you know, we need an organization. I started this thing called Portlanders for parking reform, and I just had a blog.

I would keep track of parking and I would turn people out to testimony, and I started building inroads along with groups like Bike Loud, one of our bike groups. I started working with the YIMBYs. I went to the first YB conference, and so after a couple years we got Portland and the state of Oregon kind of back on track.

And I said I think we need to replicate these skills, these lessons, and build a community to advance this movement, to make a movement. There was no movement. There was no parking reform movement. I looked into it and, and had an opportunity to start a nonprofit. To do just that and really what we are as a community at the core of people who get turned on to this issue, so we can share stories and provide support, and then we can track the success and work on messaging and kind of just make it a more social, fun experience.

I think the part of the thing was parking had this. Still does have this kind of, oh, that’s nerdy or that’s boring, and it’s not. And the people who get into it are not boring. They’re super fun. We just had a happy hour last night. That was great. Yeah. You know, great conversations. It was fun. A lot of parking, not all parking, so that that was kind of the, I just saw there was a need.

And also the YIMBY movement had started and was going great. Making a lot of progress on ending parking mandates or reducing them for residences, but they are not focused on the commercial parking requirements, which are also damaging. And there’s no constituency really organizing around that. And then there’s the whole idea of on street parking meters and permits and the, the housing groups are starting to get into that, but they weren’t really, that’s not their forte.

That’s more like maybe something a bicycle advocacy group or a transit advocacy group might be into. And so I felt like there really needed to be like a holistic place where. Because these policies, removing your mandates, charging on street parking, and then there’s another one, which is reinvesting revenue into your local community from parking.

They all work synergistically together, and so I think you need a coordinated effort to talk about all three of those things as important. At the same time,

As I’ve gotten old, I’ve we used to do a, like a Thursday night geography, happy hour in San Francisco, uh, once a month. And, and that was really fun. But once I had a kid it was kind of harder to get to. And so I’m wondering like how you pull in the folks that are super busy and wanna be involved, but also have a lot of stuff going on and trying to get ’em involved in this stuff that it’s, it’s really, you know, time consuming to go to these, uh, and important obviously.

To go to public meetings and speak, and you have turned this into like your job where you’re going around and talking to different cities and places around the country and doing it. And so how do you get the folks involved who may be super interested, but maybe not have the amount of time that they may be used to had when they were younger?

We launched in March, 2020 you know, that’s a tough one, which was tough, but also like, in a way, I, I remember even just in January. As a board, we were meeting and my board members were in Chicago and Washington DC and I’m in Portland. So we were doing like, how are we gonna get a conference call, like video call?

No one wanted to do it. And so in a way, I think like coming around during the pandemic, it made it necessary to kind of just make it an online asynchronous kind of thing. I had already done a lot of organizing on the site that used to be called Twitter, and that was really helpful. But one of the things we do is just, we have a newsletter that comes out every week and it kind of just keeps people up to date of what’s going on.

We try and keep it pretty positive and celebrate wins and we’re not, it’s not doom and gloom and we really invested a lot in webinars. They’re not super well attended, but they provide a point for people to come to. And it’s also a great way to like to have grad students present their research or talk about messaging or build relationships with partner organizations by having them on the webinar or authors.

So I think it’s more just you can have offerings that people can just keep. Touch, you know, we have a slack, but a lot of people, yeah, they’re, they are busy and I think that one of the things around parking policy advocacy is that it’s a long slog. It doesn’t require actually a ton of attention in any given time.

You’re kind of just planting seeds, having conversations. Putting it out there. And then every now and then there’s an opportunity that you gotta strike on. And then in those cases, then we convene. If someone’s doing a statewide reform, we will try to put them in touch with the people in other states that have done that before.

So a lot of it is, it is social, but it’s not organized around in-person type events. It’s really just connecting people. Oh, you’re in a coastal city with high tourist thing. Okay, well, I can connect you to a planner who works in that kind of community. I can connect you to another community that’s like that.

And then. It’s those one-to-one connections that’s building the network.

But now we’re up almost to a hundred US cities. Baltimore, I think yesterday or two days ago, voted to eliminate parking mandates citywide. Um, I think Pittsburgh is coming up soon. So there’s been great, exciting citywide reforms, but then the statewide reforms are really exciting. We’ve seen this last session, uh, Washington State passed a pretty great bill that the cities above a certain size, a lot of cities in Washington, um, restricts them from having parking requirements for things like.

Daycare and adult foster care. Connecticut actually passed a bill that got vetoed but passed out of both houses. That was a bill to eliminate parking requirements for residential requirements. The whole state Montana passed a bill similar to Washington. Two years ago, Colorado passed a bill that. It was based on transit, but it punched enough holes, kind of if you, if you imagine a map of where you can, where the city’s allowed to have parking requirements.

It punched so many holes in that map that the city planners were like, it’s not worth it to maintain the map. Let’s just get rid of the parking requirements citywide. So Denver and Boulder and other cities in Colorado on the front range, just. Are getting rid of their parking requirements. So that’s a lot of times the state reforms, even if they’re more incremental, they, they kind of push, I think of it like some people have a cooler in their garage.

They haven’t opened for a long time, and like, you open this up and it’s like, oh man, there I left some fish in, like something terrible in there. That’s when you go look at your zoning code. I think if you can force the city to go look at the zoning code, it’s terrible. And so like they might just decide, let’s just reform the whole thing rather than trying to fix it.

Upcoming, I think this next year is gonna continue on the statewide reform. We’ve heard from several states where they’re interested in introducing full repeals and there’s actually a bill in North Carolina that’s live that passed unanimously out of its house. To eliminate parking requirements in the whole state, and that one is from the river keepers.

Kaaba River Keepers promoted this bill based on conservation of waterways. Parking lots when it rains. All the water, it either floods your sewer or the sealant and the oil goes out and pollutes it. So this is a, as we have more, um, heavy rain pour events, you know, due to shifts in how our atmosphere is working that’s a problem.

And it’s something that I think is actually pretty. Universal, right? People understand they wanna protect their waterways and we spend a lot of money on sewage. Like here in Portland, we don’t have a subway, but we did drill a subway side tunnel that fills with sewage from parking lots every time it rains.

And I bet a lot of listeners if they go, look, they, they’ve seen that on their water bill. Oh yeah. We drill the, you know, we drill the subway tunnel ourselves too, that we fill with parking lot stuff every time.

Exactly. I’m curious too about your thoughts on like the other side of the equation, the developer side, because you can get rid of parking requirements, but it doesn’t say like, oh, you can’t build parking. And so sometimes we hear about how the bankers and stuff, they won’t let a developer build in a place that parking requirements are gone because it doesn’t the quote unquote pencil for them specifically.

One of our arguments is the people in the best shape to decide how much parking is needed for a business or a building. Are the people who are spending the money on it, either renting it or building it or managing it. You can trust them ’cause they don’t wanna lose money to kind of know their market. Now it’s not only bankers, right?

Some developers want to build parking. Also brokers and retailers. Whether commercial or, or residential. And even the businesses themselves, I went to a shopping center conference and they have Dave’s Hot Chicken or some other business has its own parking requirement. You can’t, you know, you need 40 spaces.

You can’t open our business in your shopping mall. So I think that’s okay. I used to get upset. I. For any parking to be built, and I still a little bit in my core Am what you’re gonna get is a few more apartments, right? We know that what’s gonna happen is that the architect is no longer constrained by the parking.

The architect builds the parking first and then builds as much housing as they’re allowed to, or as much whatever the, the, the thing you’re actually going to. They build as much of that as they can. There are other aesthetic considerations, but they’re gonna, they’re gonna do their architect thing, and if you free them from the constraints of the parking, they’re probably gonna add a few more units.

And those units are gonna be very marginally cheap. And they also don’t have an amenity associated with ’em. They don’t have the parking associated with them, so they’re probably gonna rent cheaper. You know, people say, oh, how do you know the, the landlord’s gonna charge the same price? And I say, well.

If you were renting two apartments in the same building, the exact same apartment, and one had a parking space and one didn’t, would you pay the same price? No one would do that. Like, you don’t need to study this. It’s a logical just fact. So I think over time, the benefit here, regardless of the bankers, is that we’ll see more housing built with less parking, and if that is successful, then bankers look at.

Comps, they’re gonna follow the money. That story I told early from Portland, one developer brought up a banker and convinced them that there were enough people riding bikes on Division Street, that they could put an apartment there and it would lease, and then it leased, and then we had a bunch more come in.

So once, once you show it makes money, then. The bankers are gonna follow. I think the key is remove the impediment and then the city does have to do work to make it a favorable place. You know, no one’s gonna go build an apartment with no parking in the middle of nowhere, so the city does have to do work to make it favorable, if that’s what they’re looking for, is to reduce the ownership.

I, I wish I got to know him a lot sooner. A lot of the eulogies around him and the talk after he passed away in February were like, how rare it is for an academic to see their work actually take off. I went to a memorial at U-C-L-A-A couple weeks ago and there was a comment of someone who was working with him.

It might’ve been in the early two, it might’ve been before the book came out, so early two thousands, and they were like, he was really frustrated, apparently, like I didn’t know him then, but he was really frustrated that people weren’t listening to him. I’ll just as an aside he was also really big into like repairing sidewalks and he was really frustrated up till the day he died.

I’m pretty sure that the city of LA wasn’t listening to him about how to fix all these broken sidewalks, you know? So he was the kind of guy that just, you know, he wanted to see it happen. I think the legacy, I mean, we’re seeing a short term legacy. We’re seeing a. The widespread acceptance, that parking policy, especially around parking mandates is terrible.

And we’re seeing that that’s getting rolled back. And I hope, I’m happy to say I’ve got a role in that from the organizing side. You know, he laid this groundwork of a pretty solid argument that you can point to. You can I, I’ll joke. So you can stand on the book literally, and if you’re not that tall making, you know, it’s a thick book, so you know, like it’s a great piece to back up your argument.

Long term. I think you’re right. I, I think that the impact of Shoup is gonna be assuming that, you know, we’re around, um, is gonna be extremely massive. If you think the first parking requirements went in maybe the late thirties, early forties, and it took about 30, 40 years before there was a pronounced enough problem that Donald Shoup noticed it and started scratching the surface and trying to find out what was wrong.

And then it took another like. For him to develop enough research and write his book and actually lay it bare, and then it’s taken about 20 years for that to actually start leading to on the ground policy change. That’s taken 60, 70, 80 years depending on how you count it. Now we have to unscrew up our city and that’s gonna take a long time.

If you think about like when my children are my age or older, or a child born today, if they’re growing up in a community that actually is walkable and if they have abundant affordable housing and things to do. That’s gonna be because of Don Shoup other people too. But like it wouldn’t get there without that.

So I think like his true impact is really, if we keep doing our work now, gonna be coming down the line. And I think yeah, definitely. It’s massive. Like the best is yet to come. Still granted, acknowledging all the other things going on.

Put a pin in that one. We also recently contributed to the Shoup Doctrine, which is a series of essays celebrating Donald and his work edited by Daniel Baldwin Hess. It was finished before his passing. Which did he get to read it? Do you know if he gotta look at it and stuff? Yeah,

In fact, the last email I have from him was just like a week or two before he fell ill. I was asking him some question, I don’t know, but he wrote back and said, by the way, thanks so much for writing the chapter in the book. I had the pleasure of editing, you know. 30 eulogies of myself before I died. And he, he did have kind of like a dark sense of humor.

One time he told me I was going to an event in Florida that he was at, he was receiving the seaside prize, and I got delayed due to a freak snowstorm. And he told me, he said, uh, I understand every trip I take, I hope it’s my last. And I was like, don’t,

don’t say

that. But, uh, but he, so he kind of, I think, you know, yeah, he got to read it and he loved to edit.

Apparently I learned that. And he, he got to read all these stories. I mean, what a way to go up till the end. Just seeing the impact that you’ve had on we’re just a 30 person representative sample. Multiply that by 10 of people who he’s probably significantly impacted their lives at least, and he taught thousands of students at UCLA.

So yeah, it’s great.

Parking was simply the vehicle one might say that he chose to do so.

But I think also he was a funny guy and I think parking bandaids are crazy. And so like, I think just the absurdity of the situation. Cracks me up and I know cracked him up. Like as upsetting as it is, it’s also just like. When you see things like a haunted house parking requirement in Gilbert, Arizona for 101 for hundred square feet, and then in Carver, Massachusetts, there’s a, a cemetery requirement, one for eight occupants.

Like, what does that even I, it’s a never ending supply of jokes and ridiculous stories, the absurdity. So I, I think he wasn that sounds like a good

I’m wondering where the strangest place is that you’ve heard a reference to either Donald Shoup or the high cost of free parking.

It’s Ally Wong. I think the opening episode is. This woman cut someone off in a parking lot and then beef, it’s called beef and beef. Yeah, beef. They have their incident in the parking lot and they’re chasing each other down the road. And then it’s very clear the street, I think, where they run over some plants and have all this thing, it’s soup avenue.

And, and I don’t know. I would love to know. I, I, I feel like that’s like a reference. The show starts in a parking lot and then they have a shot where Shoup Avenue is in the background. I’m gonna say that I think there was a Easter egg. Maybe someone will hear this and confirm or deny it, but if it’s not intentional, there’s definitely.

A Shoup Easter egg in beef.

And so here in the United States, I feel like because of all the parking that we’ve built, because of all these lots that are the size of Fayetteville, Arkansas, the heat island effects are devastating. And there’s parts in the summer in Phoenix where you can’t even walk on the sidewalk without like burning yourself.

And so I’m wondering if you’ve seen a lot of discussion about that recently where it’s not just the transportation aspect or the housing aspect, but the environmental aspect as it pertains to global warming, the heat effect. Uh, you know, you had a heat dome here in Portland, right? A couple years ago that was crazy hot.

Those types of things.

Um, we did a literature review a while back of studies that talk about flooding or urban heat island effects, and one interesting thing is that a lot of the academic research talks about this. Euphemistic. Oh, paved surfaces. And I, I think one thing we, we need to do cover. Yeah. And I think that the researchers need to start calling this out for what?

It’s, these are government mandated parking lots, right? I mean, sure. Roads are paved surfaces and they contribute, but they have an extreme utility that we aren’t, you know, I know my food came here on a truck. You know, so, you know, but we don’t need to require all these parking lots and so that’s a negative.

We did a bunch of parking lot maps, if you’ve seen on our website, you know, we guy Thomas Carto did these maps of a bunch of downtowns and researchers have taken those overlays. Several research labs have taken them and one used them to make a machine vision model to a computer vision model to be able to help identify parking lots in a satellite map.

So we can do more of this research. And then there’s an another researcher, Vanderbilt, uh. Is an environmental ecologist and is looking at using these maps to look at various things, heat issues. Um, I learned from her that parking lots are one of the largest sources of light pollution. And you brought up Arizona.

I know there’s a professor, David King there who studies parking and he, he’s really interested in this for the public health aspect around like if you get off on a bus on the street. You might die walking across the parking lot in the middle of the summer. If you’re a person with fragile health. You know, like you might not be able to make it.

And I think that these are going to become more aware and I, and I hope that environmental and public health organizations and funders look at some of this built environment stuff. I do think there’s a gap in climate. Public health, environmental advocacy and funding around land use and small T transportation, I’ll call it like individual mobility, shared mobility.

I was at Climate Week. These aren’t things that they’re really, it’s clean tech. It’s ev and it’s like, no, we can do these, some solutions on the ground that are actually just policy switches that don’t cost anything. They might even make money for your city. They don’t generate a whole new industry, but they actually.

Provide a lot of value. So I, I don’t know, that’s a roundabout way of saying I do see it, and I think it’s only gonna become more, more apparent.

They get our goods to where we wanna go. They get electricity, water, sewer, communications, infrastructure. The street is an interesting kind of, uh, mechanism for all those things, but it’s also something that, you know, has this problem at the moment where we park all of our cars in it. Right. So I’m curious your thoughts on like the value of streets generally as part of that overall system that we live in.

They’ll know, like there’s a, there’s kind of a thought sometimes you’ll say your streets are, are actually a liability for the city. ’cause they cost so much. I mean, they’re extremely valuable, but they’re unpriced and the city has to maintain them. And, but the curbs are, in my opinion, like they’re a big asset and they’re an undervalued asset.

There’s a lot of things we could be doing them. We know, we saw the pandemic showed us alfresco dining. But then we see that being rolled back in a lot of cities. And I think some of that is that it’s hard to value, like in the downtown core, this is the most valuable land on Earth and 200 square feet of it is free.

And then next to there you wanna put a restaurant or whatever and like there, that should cost something. But it’s, it’s unfair to charge the person with their business necessarily if the person’s storing their car there for free. And it’s, we had this kind of like. Because parking is so underpriced. It’s this weird paradox where it’s like both.

Invaluable and valueless. And I think by starting to price it, we can start to actually see and make trade-offs between, okay, well this should be a pickup and drop-off zone. This should be a bus lane. This should be a bike lane. You know? And also then when you install that infrastructure, if you’re using a demand based pricing scheme for your downtown parking, like if you’re something like SF Park or, or what Seattle does the adjacent parking spaces will adjust.

They’ll become a little more valuable. The curb should be about mobility. It’s about the interface between how. Things get to places and how they get into places. And we, we really can do a lot more, I think, to provide better access and improve transit and raise funding for transit and other mobility. And another big one is, um, obviously we know local freight, right?

That’s a big kind of thing. No one like, please charge me a couple bucks every time that delivery truck comes to my house. Like, I would, I would love to pay, I would love to pay that money and have it go towards something that helps remove those. Vehicles from the street so often and helps us make things better.

So I think, yeah, the curb is kind of the next frontier on, I think, parking reform, helping cities or providing, what’s the playbook? How do we, how do we get the flywheel going on street management the same way we have for parking minimum reforms. And we’re working hard to try and figure that out.

The economy of the curve, because there is so much that happens at the curve, especially with this, uh, delivery system revolution that we’ve had. It’s also interesting to think about all these, um, all these warehouses have been popping up at cities like warehousing used to be, you know, we get, we, the Pearl District and, and everything else will get changed because warehousing and, and urban industry wasn’t a thing anymore.

But now it is again, because all of these. Companies like Amazon and UPS and everybody else. Now they need places in the city that are warehouses, that are places that were probably formerly industrial because they have this massive delivery, you know, mandate from their customers. And it’s interesting to see like that shift again, going back in time to places that need this.

And now, not just that, the urban industrial areas, but the streets that they use, right? Mm-hmm. The streets that they use to deliver all these things. And there’s value in that. And how to extract that value is interesting. And where we use that value eventually is interesting too. And so from your perspective, there’s a discussion about when we do price parking, where do we use the money that gets raised from that?

But also if you’re talking about delivery systems, like if you are charging somebody a dollar per parcel to deliver something, where does that money go?

One, it’s fair, the people who, they’re taking the burden of that traffic in their community and you’re reinvesting. And it also helps by political will From them, you’re improving their, their neighborhood. By charging for parking, the money’s not going into a black hole. It’s also really good because cities get hooked on parking revenue, and let’s say you have a plan, a bike pedestrian plan, or a mode shift plan that’s supposed to reduce the number of drive trips, but you’re also funding a good chunk of your discretionary.

Operations at your transportation department or your city from parking revenue. Well, what’s gonna win? You know, like, are we really gonna try and remove the parking spaces or discourage people from driving downtown? ’cause we know that’s gonna hurt our bottom line. So doing this kind of local investment, it helps to make it so that the city is not as hooked on the parking revenue.

For the delivery. And this is a little outside of the parking sphere, but, um, I think we need more logistics ties back also to people who are car light or car free. We need networks in our cities. This is my pitch, is that we need networks in our cities to help move stuff around that’s not by a conglomerate, not Amazon or, or FedEx.

And I think that if I, if I was in charge and I was assessing a fee for every delivery, I would invest that first in, um, local. For package pickup. So the idea is you don’t want the truck driving down every street. If you wanted to drive to your house, you pay a couple extra bucks, otherwise it gets dropped off at this.

Facility that the city ideally runs and then maybe you pay a neighbor kid to take a cargo bike and go pick up everyone’s packages, like an old paper delivery person. I dunno, could create some economy for people. Some some smaller electric vehicles. But also those hubs I envision could serve as a way for selfishly.

If I come downtown here to Portland and I buy something big, I don’t have a car and it’s hard for me to get it back home. And I would love to have, I think if we really want people to reduce their dependency on automobile, we do need to solve this problem by moving stuff. And I think there’s a, a opportunity here to like come up with a solution of some sort of circulator where I can drop something at one of these facilities downtown and depending on how fast I need it, pay to have it show up at the facility.

Across town and go get it. And that would be a great, I think public service that would not only support. Going car free, but would support local business too. How, how can local businesses compete with the logistical prowess of amazon.com? Well, I think this is one way, maybe they can, you know, if you have a system of cheap local logistics, maybe that’s a thing.

It’s a little off the, off the topic, but it’s something I think about a lot, and I think that it solves some of these problems because when you’re trying to get people to accept that an apartment can be built with no parking spaces, they’re like, well, what about. When they need to buy a sofa, what about when they need to, you know, bring a bunch of groceries home?

And so I think that attacking some of those legitimate arguments that I, I understand. I don’t have a car. It sucks sometimes. If you can solve that problem for me, then you can convince a lot of other people that maybe they don’t need the second car anymore. Maybe they don’t need a car at all.

They have four or five or six, uh, high rises and there’s probably 30 stories tall. And in order to get your tau or whatever you ordered, you have to go to this center that’s run by this couple. It’s basically a storefront. They take all the packages in and organize them, and then you come and you put your phone in the thing, and then they give you your package.

And I feel like that’s the kind of thing you’re talking about, which is like Amazon, I guess, does it with an Amazon locker, but a more local way is like having this couple be the package delivery takers every day. And so you don’t have to be home to take it, you just have to go in the next 24 hours or else they yell at you, right?

I think, at least in the places where we want to live. Compactly, uh, environmentally friendly. Active lifestyles, you need these places. I mean, I was in New York recently and I was using Bounce. I mean, there are apps to help facilitate this, but you know, it would be nice if it was a little more formalized where this was just a thing we did where it’s easy to get a package here or there, and I think we can, I think we will move towards that.

It’s just, it would be super helpful if our cities could unlock some funding sources that could help. Support these things because I think sometimes these types of services, bike share, car share, this kind of logistical thing, they’re hard to, especially to start up, they don’t make a lot of money and they shouldn’t necessarily make a lot of money.

Bike share shouldn’t be a giant profit center transit, so I think that these public goods do need subsidy and having. Know this source of money in the curb is a great way to try to improve some of these services or potential services.

Right? So we have to rethink the way that we think about profit, and we think about running cities like a business quote unquote. I had Daniel Wardell London on the show and he wrote a book about the New York City and the different times where they could have been more progressive or Henry George could have been the mayor of New York City and they could have changed so that the developers weren’t the ones that were making the money off the development and then we were taxing them.

But maybe the city is being the developer and they’re the ones that are making the money and then distributing that to the population in a different way. And so I think that discussion, if we start to like think about it differently. And the value that cities create for the residents. I think there’s a way that the package delivery thing could be profitable for a city to do, but profitable in the sense that, yeah, you might make a little money, but you’re also creating more value for your citizens in that way.

Then you start to change your behavior and it’s, this isn’t a, I’m don’t wanna force anyone to do anything. I think that just the option that the avenue to understanding that this life is possible and actually is. Generally, other than the annoyances, it’s great not driving, you know? But I think that’s why when I talk about, like it needs some subsidy because I think that some of these services, maybe not the package delivery example, but they’re harder to keep going.

And you do need a base that supports it. It needs good investment and infrastructure. I, I love bike share, but if you take a bike somewhere and then you can’t count on there being a bike to come back from that neighborhood. You’re not gonna take, and that’s kinda what happened here in Portland.

I stopped using the bike share because if I could find a bike in my neighborhood, I was pretty sure there wasn’t gonna be one for me to come back with. And so I just got my own e-bike and I would rather not

own my own e-bike.

Yeah, that’s a digression here, but where can folks find out more about the parking reform network?

We have a website, parking reform.org. We have a presence on most social media, whether it’s monitored or active. Pretty active on Instagram, blue Sky. We have an account there. We have a YouTube channel. So I would say online is a great way to look and get on our newsletter. We have a weekly newsletter that people really enjoy that will tell you where you might find us in person.

Get your passport. I haven it. I haven’t, it’s, it’s, it’s shameful. So I would like, I think, uh, the Canadian parking Reform network as well. Yeah. I mean, Toronto has no parking mandates. Um, Ottawa’s coming soon. Canada actually has bigger cities that have done the reform than the United States. So

Well, I’ll be there. I’ll hope to see you there. Where can folks find you specifically? Tony Jordan, if you wish to be found?

All kinds of em. Housing conferences, transportation conferences, shopping center conferences, climate week, I’m probably there.