Portland's Parallel Parking Contest Returns Bigger, With PBOT and a Drag Queen Judge

A parking contest that started as an offhand joke between two friends last summer is rolling back into Southeast Portland this weekend, only this time it has the Portland Bureau of Transportation as a sponsor and a drag queen on the judges' panel. The second annual Portland Parallel Parking Competition takes place Sunday from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. at Southeast Pine Street and Southeast 29th Avenue, and organizers say it has grown well beyond the small neighborhood gathering it was born as.

The whole thing started in late June 2025, when Daniel Lyman and his best friend Stefanie Lynch were talking and, according to The Oregonian/OregonLive, Lyman said, “let's do a parallel parking competition this weekend.” Lynch, who lives in Los Angeles but spends a couple months each summer in Portland, borrowed the concept from the Pittsburgh Parallel Parking Championship, an annual event founded in 2021 by Dan Leber that uses a custom equation to score precision, according to Car and Driver. What Lyman and Lynch put together was originally meant to be a one-off, but as OregonLive's account details, dozens of contestants showed up on short notice in front of Lyman's Southeast Portland street.

From Reddit Post to National Attention

The inaugural contest ran on Saturday, June 28, 2025, drawing roughly 100 people just days after Lyman posted about it on Reddit, according to OPB. To keep things fair and old-school, organizers taped cardboard over every backup camera and banned automated self-parking features, forcing drivers to rely on nothing but mirrors and instinct — a rule set OPB's reporting and a separate account from The Drive both describe in detail, including pool noodles taped to neighboring cars and chalk lines marking curb distance. The winner walked away with a homemade trophy: a spray-painted gold toy Subaru mounted on a plaque reading “Grand Prize.”

That quirky, low-stakes charm helped the event snowball. Organizers ended up appearing on Good Morning America, per the seed reporting, and the contest was later named one of OPB's top bright-spot news stories of 2025. Participants asked to be added to a mailing list for next year's contest, the same reporting notes, effectively forcing Lyman and Lynch to make the one-off into a tradition.

A Bigger Field, Official Sponsors, and New Judges

This year's event is officially branded as the competition's second annual running, and it now carries the backing of the Portland Bureau of Transportation, which reached out to Lyman about getting involved and is supplying prizes, including Parking Kitty vouchers for the app PBOT first launched in May 2017 with Portland State University and Portland Parks & Recreation, according to the City of Portland. The app's payments also feed a Parking Climate and Equitable Mobility Transaction Fee that the city instituted in 2022, generating an estimated $2 million a year for local transit initiatives such as the Transportation Wallet program for low-income residents, per the city's own account.

The judging panel has expanded too. Nicole Onoscopi, a drag queen, will commentate and judge competitors alongside KOIN-TV meteorologist Josh Cozart and a PBOT parking enforcement officer, according to the seed reporting. A tournament of champions featuring the top five or 10 drivers is planned to close out the day. Lyman, who organized the inaugural contest and has overseen this year's edition as well, will not be competing — he told OregonLive that competing himself would not be fair, given his hand in organizing it.

Why Manual Parking Still Trips Up Oregon Drivers

Part of what makes the contest resonate locally is a quirk in how Oregon actually tests and enforces parking skills. State law, under Oregon Revised Statute 811.570, requires drivers on two-way streets to park parallel to the curb with their right-hand wheels within 12 inches of it, according to OregonLaws. Missing that mark is classified as a Class D traffic violation carrying a presumptive $110 fine, per the Beaverton Police Department.

Yet Oregon's own DMV practical road test does not actually require applicants to parallel park, instead evaluating a 20-foot straight backing maneuver, according to driver-education site Zutobi. That gap between what the law demands on the street and what the state actually tests may help explain why parallel parking remains an unpracticed, occasionally dreaded skill for plenty of Oregon drivers — and why watching neighbors attempt it without a backup camera has become such a draw.

Lyman has said he parallel parked in front of his own house for about a decade before any of this started, a detail that underscores just how ordinary the skill being tested really is. One letter he and his husband received, from the father of last year's champion in Iowa, described how the competition made his daughter feel proud of herself and, per the letter, helped her feel at home in Portland.

Part of a Growing National Trend

Portland's contest is no longer alone in the genre. Philadelphia recently announced its own three-round championship for October 3, drawing more than 800 applicants for just 20 competing spots, Hoodline reported in its piece on the South Philly parking showdown. Like Portland's event, the Philadelphia contest bars digital parking aids in favor of pure manual driving.

For now, Sunday's rematch on Southeast Pine Street is shaping up to be the biggest version yet of an event that began as little more than a weekend whim. With city sponsorship, national media attention, and a mailing list full of returning fans, what Lyman and Lynch figured might happen once is now, by all appearances, here to stay.