About Us

Studio Davis is a small and dynamic planning firm with industry-leading expertise in areas including parking and curb zone management, transit-friendly planning, and site planning. Our core belief is that how a community plans for parking and transportation is one of the most important factors influencing a place’s economic outcomes and quality of life. Studio Davis thrives upon balancing technical and political factors to deliver effective solutions to the communities we serve, and ultimately produce plans that are not merely aspirational but also actionable.

The following factors set us apart from our competition in the field of parking management:

1. We believe parking is a tool for making a place. It is an extremely powerful tool—one that can influence livability, walkability, economic success, culture, and more—but merely a tool nonetheless. So from engagement to analysis, we ask questions about what sort of place we’re trying to build, and then seek out ideas and interventions to craft a parking system that serves this vision.
2. We believe that planning work is a creative practice. In our work, we seek to understand and bring about a vision for a downtown at its finest. We believe boilerplate parking plans are less than useless and always start with a blank page, selecting carefully from established parking management tools and often creating new ones, always keeping in mind the unique context of a particular place.
3. Lastly, our small size and our passion for parking planning translates directly to a level of expertise at a value no other firms can match. Parking consulting has historically been dominated by two types of firms: “Boutique” transportation consultants that (incorrectly) view parking as tangential to higher-minded ideals around walkability and safety, and big firms that primarily design parking garages and vend management systems and use planning services as a gateway to upsell the higher ticket items. Our focus on parking planning in its proper context simply delivers better results than out competitors.

Brian Davis is a thinker, tinkerer, and change-maker with a passion for placemaking. A nationally recognized leader in the field of parking management, Brian has worked with cities as large as Charlotte, North Carolina (population 850,000) and as small as Yachats, Oregon (population 950) to solve the unique set of parking issues present in those communities.

Brian has extensive experience will all aspects of parking planning, including leading data collection and analysis, facilitating stakeholder meetings and processes, conducting public engagement, preparing maps and infographics, and most of all, finding creative solutions to the unique set of parking problems that each new place presents. His experience is that the best outcomes arise when city staff and the consulting team are close, communicative collaborators lending their respective expertise toward the shared goal of effective solutions. He is an ardent believer in using good data and clear communication to inform parking policy.

In addition to his role at Studio Davis, Brian has taught Portland State University’s well-known class in Site Planning for the last several years, leading graduate students as they produce a full plan for development of a vacant site. He is a popular speaker on topics related to parking, transportation, and urban design, with recent speaking engagements at the Oregon Main Street Conference, Oregon Active Transportation Summit, Walk/Bike/Places, and many others. His is a founding member and volunteer for the Parking Reform Network, the nation’s first advocacy group devoted specifically to parking policy.

About our branding

The shape of the logo derives from the areas of overlap on a Venn Diagram and represents our foundational approach: Cities and communities are complex creatures, and tackling their problems requires a collaborative, multi-disciplinary approach. You’ve got to consider context, and stave off unintended consequences. You’ve got to work in those intersections.