In fact, city transportation leaders are pining for improved analytics to help them understand the impacts of deliveries, ride-hailing, micromobility and other curbside activities — and how those uses could be better managed — according to a new survey by Populus, a transportation data analytics technology company. The survey found that just 3 percent of municipalities polled have prioritized replacing curbside parking meters.
“We are seeing that a lot of cities are opting to replace single-space meters — a meter at every single parking spot — with multispace meters,” Populus CEO Regina Clewlow said, explaining the results of the Populus 2024 State of Curbs and Parking report, released this month. Even these steps, Clewlow added, are leading to some cities moving “entirely to digital solutions, including digital curb management as well as allowing for paid parking via mobile app."
As improved curb management tech solutions enter the market and cities face new and expanded challenges around the use of curbs, transportation officials are prioritizing moves to use parking data to inform their decision-making. They are also exploring more dynamic parking environments where spaces can transition to other purposes like deliveries, depending on demand, the survey said.
The Populus survey found 85 percent of respondents reported managing deliveries as a “major challenge.” More than 30 cities completed the survey, Clewlow said, ranging in size from Miami and Chicago to Providence, R.I.
And even though many cities have access to various streams of data related to curbsides — coming to them via sensors, cameras or parking hardware — only 29 percent of officials say they are satisfied with their data analytics solutions, according to the Populus report.
Cities like Minneapolis, Minn., and San Francisco and San Jose, Calif., have been actively moving forward on projects to digitally inventory their curb space in an effort to better understand it, and to design solutions that meet modern mobility needs and contribute to satisfying particular climate goals.
“Our long-term goals are about making our curbs safer. We have very ambitious climate goals. And we want to increase accessibility,” said Sarah Abroff, co-project lead with the planning department in the San Jose Department of Transportation, during an Open Mobility Foundation webinar Sept. 11, to explain the city’s curb management goals.
San Jose is part of the Open Mobility Foundation’s SMART Curb Collaborative, a group of 10 cities that received U.S. Department of Transportation Strengthening Mobility and Revolutionizing Transportation (SMART) grants and which are all using curb data specifications to support a variety of projects.
In San Francisco, where streets are multiuse spaces designed to accommodate all forms of conveyance, city officials want curbs to be equally accommodating and dynamic. But first, all curbs must be digitally inventoried as part of real-time data sets, to be easily viewed and manipulated by multiple departments.
“Building a citywide curb data set is not easy. But once it’s created, it’s also immediately out of date. Because there’s always changes happening,” said Alex Demisch, the project lead for the curb digitization project at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, highlighting the need for these inventories to be digital.
The aim is to keep curb data up to date, in part through improved systems and data integration, which “then sets the foundation for actually digitally managing the curb,” Demisch explained during the webinar. San Francisco is working with INRIX on the project.
