Meet the PRN

Part of downtown Milwaukee. Parking (surface and structures) in red.

Those familiar with foundational Strong Towns principles understand that the safety, productivity, and resiliency of a city starts with thoughtful land use and equitable sharing of the paved environment. Excessive car storage in the middle of the city accomplishes none of these things. A legendary UCLA professor built a career researching, documenting, and educating us on why this is, and what he landed on was the revelation that free (or cheap) parking is anything but. The knock-on effects of setting aside large swathes of land for parking ranged from substantially kicking up the cost of development to increased air pollution created by cars circling the block looking for storage.

With apologies to Henry Grabar, maybe parking really does explain the world.

With that in mind, Tony Jordan founded the Parking Reform Network, a non-profit with the stated goal of educating the public about the impact of parking policy on climate change, equity, housing, and traffic.

Strong Towns Metro MKE is fortunate that Tony will be visiting both Madison and Milwaukee next month, and we’re setting aside the evening of Wednesday June 17th, 6:00 pm, to learn more about PRN and what reform might look like in Milwaukee if we take the lessons learned to heart…and to our elected officials. We’ll meet for about an hour and hopefully get a little socializing in afterwards. More details and an easy sign up found here.