Clearing Up Curbside Chaos
Everyone wants a slice of the curb: while you circle for a parking space, a bicyclist swerves into traffic to avoid a delivery truck parked in the bike lane. Up ahead, a car is dropping off riders in the middle of a bus stop. Meanwhile, pedestrians weave between cars blocking the crosswalk. Add in a sprinkle of shared bikes and dockless scooters and you have a classic case of curbside congestion.
This space between streets and buildings has clearly never been more valuable. In considering how to resolve the competition between a growing number of actors, many conversations leave out a critical piece of the curb management puzzle: before we can “fix” the curb, we must first understand what’s actually happening there, why those activities matter, and who benefits from them.
City Tech Collaborative
(City Tech), together with
Bosch,
HERE Technologies,
Stantec,
Teralytics,
SpotHero, and
CarrierDirect, launched the
Curbside Management Solution
to create a scalable model to enable coordinated, dynamic curbside operations. Combining new data on curb demand and economic value with emerging technology and pricing models, the team was able to understand just how much curb space is allocated to different users and how to best optimize space to clear up the chaos – thus transforming this inert infrastructure into dynamic and valuable nodes in our urban transportation systems.
Taking a Data-Driven Approach
As any transportation official knows, cities need a better approach and smarter tools for curb management. But many residents and policymakers may not recognize the opportunity right under our feet. Taking loading zones as an example, CarrierDirect found through focused interviews with large freight companies that under current conditions, the companies would rather pay citation tickets than spend extra time finding parking –
and they have the budgets to act accordingly. Even saving 15 minutes a day in parking across all drivers would save millions of dollars in delivery fees and time for these freight companies. However, with the shift to the gig economy, individual vehicles owners are responsible for paying any citation fees; because of this, vehicle owners are less willing to take high risks and will spend more time looking for parking. All agreed that having access to high-demand curb spaces is worth the cost, and they would even pay up to $5 for a prime location to unload for just 15 to 30 minutes.
The primary goal of City Tech’s Curbside Management project was to demonstrate the ability to create a scalable model of curb use and economic value to inform improved curbside operations. Rather than designing a specific solution to a single stretch of curb space, the team took a holistic approach that encompasses a broad range of typical urban curb uses; this framework will allow any city to replicate the model’s analysis while accounting for local priorities and conditions. Using portions of Chicago’s central business district (the Loop) as a testbed, the team first identified a baseline of (pre-pandemic) curb usage to understand how people and companies were using the curb and its relative value. Using anonymized and aggregated data from Teralytics and SpotHero, HERE Technologies’ data science team then analyzed traffic and congestion activity to identify critical choke points, bottlenecks, and friction areas at specific geographic locations. This highlighted target areas where curb demand exceeded supply – or vice versa – and identified opportunities for more efficient curb utilization. Taking these findings, Stantec led the creation of a business model that identifies the curb’s economic value to different users at different times, creating a data-driven foundation for dynamic curb space management. As a leading global supplier of technology and services, Bosch provided guidance on the necessary hardware and software requirements to implement pilot learnings and support future curb management efforts.
Maximizing Access and Revenue for Everyone
The resulting model has laid a path for cities to make informed choices in implementing curb operation solutions; the model provides suggestions based on actual curbside demand, but it can model results for a variety of curbside access goals. This flexibility allows users to personalize the way a city chooses to allocate space based on their unique considerations.
For example, despite the broad shift to a variety of mobility modes, curbs in Chicago’s Loop remain dedicated to automobiles. In the area examined, car parking takes up 49% of all curb length (2,500 spaces), transit uses 24% (215 stops), and loading spaces occupy an additional 23% (800 zones). Taxis and Divvy bikes share under 1% of curb length with no dedicated areas for rideshare pick-up and drop-off.
With the interrelated goals of aligning curb demand with actual space use, increasing front door access, and understanding municipal revenue impacts, the Curbside Management team modeled a more efficient distribution of curb space to different types of users. In order to make space for everyone in the area examined, the ideal curb allocation includes a 75% reduction in loading zone spaces, the addition of 250 new off-street car parking spots, and the creation of 250+ taxi spaces, 500+ Divvy docks, and 300 rideshare spaces.
With this modeled curb layout, some travelers would shift from driving and parking to more economical modes of access – resulting in a slight reduction of overall driving demand. However, the higher parking pricing at certain times of the day needed to create availability for other modes at the curb results in a 50% increase in daily curbside revenues. While the model assumes a transactional charge for rideshare and freight access, traditional car parking remains the overwhelming source (over 75%) of curbside revenues.
Although this scenario is one potential suggestion of how curb access could be improved in Chicago’s Loop, different goals will result in an adjusted curb allocation. Looking beyond the Loop and beyond Chicago, the model provides a scalable tool to understand demand at the curb and meet communities’ unique considerations.
Next Steps
The Curbside Management team demonstrated how multiple, complex datasets can be integrated into a single, useful model that can generate specific recommendations for curb space allocation, pricing, and enforcement. A data-driven approach that considers both the demand for curb space and its relative value can bring more people to a space, maximize curb access for everyone, and potentially increase curbside revenues for cities. This capability can provide an important baseline for direct engagement with residents around community planning, provide an implementation path for broader mobility goals, and create new opportunities for products and services to better manage this congested space.
The team’s work has laid the foundation for multiple paths toward curbside management solutions in cities globally. The model can continue to improve with additional data, allowing it to reflect better knowledge of block-by-block on-street parking utilization and freight deliveries, improved understanding of rideshare double-parking conflicts, and localized observations of turnover and dwell times at the curb. The model also points to high-impact interventions that could be selectively implemented today, such as diversifying curb access in specific areas or moving other modes off-street. Finally, through strong partnerships with cities, the curbside management solution can be scaled and applied to other locations, taking into account each community’s unique goals and considerations.
As our transportation systems continue to become more dynamic and complex, we must ensure our infrastructure is keeping up with the latest trends. This data-informed, flexible model is a dynamic and responsive solution that any city can use to respond to changing demands over time – whether that is yearly, daily, or even hourly.
About City Tech Collaborative (City Tech): City Tech is an urban solutions accelerator that tackles problems too big for any single sector or organization to solve alone. City Tech’s work uses IoT sensing networks, advanced analytics, and urban design to create scalable, market ready solutions. Current initiatives address advanced mobility, healthy cities, connected infrastructure, and emerging growth opportunities. City Tech was born and raised in Chicago, and every city is a potential partner. Visit www.CityTech.org and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.
