In urban areas like San Jose and San Francisco, digital curb projects could lead to better understanding parking needs, and pricing that parking accordingly.
In San Jose, nearly all of the street parking is set at a flat $2 an hour, explained Elias Khoury, program manager for the San Jose Transportation Department. In 2023, San Jose was awarded a roughly $2 million federal grant to fund a pilot project centered on better understanding curb use. That project is helping produce the data needed to explore dynamic parking rates on the curb.
“We are hoping to create a dynamic pricing model that can support initiatives to either increase or lower the rates, based on supply and demand,” Khoury said in comments during an Aug. 20 webinar organized by the Open Mobility Foundation.
“At this time, we cannot do it. I think with the technology that we are deploying and getting the data, we can create those pricing models,” he added.
Farther north, in Portland, Ore., officials are involved in a similar curb data project — this one to create a zero-emission delivery zone in downtown.
Transportation technology company INRIX is “leading the technology stack that’s going in to support that delivery zone,” Michael Schwartz, general manager of city software solutions for INRIX, told Government Technology.
Portland officials will learn about the city’s curbs via the curb analytics data collected. A portion of this data will enable them to visualize the operations of B-Line, the micro-freight operator, in the same way Portland already visualizes micromobility data.
“So we’ll be able to leverage those partnerships to be able to have data-informed decision-making about how the delivery zone is working, in real time,” Schwartz said.
Organizations like the Open Mobility Foundation (OMF) have developed and promoted systems of common language around how mobility happens in cities, and how the curbs are used, through the development of “mobility data specifications” (MDS) and “curb data specifications (CDS).
These steps form the foundation to build data-driven and tech-supported transportation systems. Cities are aiming to institutionalize digital curb data management, beyond the effort “to just code the curb,” said Michael Schnuerle, OMF’s director of open source operations.
“You’re internally trying to change your processes and your asset management system, and the pipeline of using that data throughout your whole organization,” Schnuerle said during the webinar.
Using the language of MDS and CDS, INRIX is also working with the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), which has oversight over curbs and parking, to document physical assets on the street — including signage, parking spaces and bus stops — in one real-time digital platform.
“They are physical assets within the streets. And the goal is to create a sort of system, by which whenever there’s an update to one of those things … that will ripple through to our data, and we will proactively be able to make that change,” Schwartz said.
INRIX already has a deep cache of parking data for about 125 cities in North America and Europe which, when leveraged with additional data like the many features making up curbs and sidewalks, can create a deep reservoir of data to inform any number of policy decisions related to the curb.
“In the longer term, how can we use that to talk about changes to the curb,” is the way Schwartz described how INRIX hopes its data project in San Francisco will lead to policy directions.
This is not unlike the direction San Jose is moving in its project to collect and understand curb data.
“We are hoping that with these models, we can present to policy-makers in order to change the things that we need to change,” Khoury said. “So that they can support other initiatives, other than the $2-per-hour meter rate.”
