Over the past five years curb management has become the topic du jour of the urban mobility industry. Climate change and a global pandemic have dramatically accelerated needs around retail, work and health, while advancing technologies and market forces have either adapted to these needs or exacerbated them to impact not only transportation but almost every aspect of our daily lives. In the urban mobility landscape, there is no place where this impact is more evident than at our curbs. This has led to a new need in the curb management market to help public agencies meet their desired outcomes around equity, sustainability, efficiency, public health, and transparency.
Taking the approach famously stated by former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it and you can’t fix it.” Many cities have begun their transition from parking management to curb management by attempting to map data and insights to the curbs they desire to manage. As cities look to leverage existing events data – such as parking transactions and citations – and bring in new data sources from cameras, sensors, and connected devices to analyze and communicate occupancy, availability, turnover, and many other metrics, it is critical to hit a sweet spot on accurate and sustainable mapping to associate these events and metrics with. More specifically, cities need data that adequately reflects residents’ real-life experiences while also balancing the costs associated with the time, means and methods for collecting this data.
Summary
- Signs alone are insufficient for accurate curb mapping. While signs provide some information about curb regulations, they do not capture all the nuances and complexities of usage.
- Sign inventory only solutions can lead to inaccurate public data. Driveways, bus stops, and clear zones are often not represented in sign inventories, resulting in incomplete and misleading maps.
- Policies are essential for comprehensive curb management. Policies, as defined by the Curb Data Specification (CDS), provide a framework for understanding how curbs can be used, signed or not.
- Policies are the cornerstone of sustainable curb management. Accurate and up-to-date curb data, informed by policies, is essential for effective decision-making and planning in urban mobility.
- INRIX Curb Analytics goes beyond signs. By collecting data on off-street parking and curbside inventories and providing analytics associated with those inventories, INRIX provides a more comprehensive and accurate picture of curb usage that benefits everyday users and the public and private sectors.
Introduction
In the US, a parking sign is the source of truth for curb usage. However, asset and record quality vary by city – ranging from very good assets for parking signs associated with payment locations or no parking areas to disorganized records for things like curb paint or curb cuts. Regardless of the quality of sign records, sign inventories do not make all of the rules and regulations for how to use the right-of-way. Many rules and regulations are not signed at all, inconsistently signed, globally handled through city and state laws, or demarcated with other right-of-way features such as paint (the infamous red or yellow curb) or curb cuts and driveways. This is why the idea of policies, as defined by the Open Mobility Foundation (OMF) in the Curb Data Specification (CDS), is so critical. Ultimately for users of the right-of-way and at a higher level to meet the outcomes for curb managers, policies tell you how a piece of the curb can be used, signed or not.
So why is this so important? Linking a few of the threads above, there are a number of well-intentioned newcomers to the curb mapping world who are taking a shortcut and equating signs to policies which only produces inaccurate maps that will lead to unintended consequences. Any reasonable parking manager knows that this leads to an incomplete picture.
So why is a sign-only solution incomplete? Our analysis found that segmentation of the curb zones can be as low as 55% accurate in a number of urban cores. Segmentation is the dividing up of the curb line into distinct zones with their respective rules (think: ADA parking zone next to delivery zone, adjacent to fire hydrant , next to paid parking zone). Segmentation is the only element of our tests that relies on accurate geolocation.
As stated above, there are many areas where parking regulations aren’t signed. I’ll break down a few here to show where this type of approach can go wrong:
Driveways and Fire Hydrants
No city universally signs driveways. Depending on the density of the location, there can be up to couple to dozens of driveways per city block.
In the example below, even in the densest part of the densest city in America, New York City, there are a number of driveways that aren’t represented in their signs. In this fantastic map developed by WXY Studios , the NYCDOT sign records has represented a curb zone with time of day restrictions, loading and paid parking.
What isn’t shown here is there are two driveways in this location that lead to 150-space and 21-space off-street garages, which are represented in the screenshot of INRIX Curb Analytics below.
Google Street View below shows there is no signage to demarcate the driveways.
It’s not too big of a deal, right? But, the omission of these regulations are important if you want to accurately represent the curb. In Tribeca, which is one of the densest areas in NYC, there are 1249 on-street spaces, of which driveways make up 2.5%. — 31 spaces is not an insignificant number of spaces to be off.
When you look at less dense parts of NYC like Astoria or the Upper West Side, which Don Shoup has written about extensively you see the magnitude of the potential inaccuracies. In the Upper West Side, there is more space allocated to driveways than Commercial and Passenger Loading, combined.
In less dense areas where many cities are looking to improve pedestrian and cycling safety on arterial streets or implement speed and reliability improvements for transit — parking is often rightfully being looked at as a lower priority. In my past positions in both the Mayor’s Office in Seattle and at Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT), I advocated heavily that neighborhood streets should be accounted for when looking at overall capacity for arterial parking losses to ensure distances remain walkable to businesses (i.e. losing a parking space in front of a business can mitigate real and perceived impacts if ample parking is available around the corner). This approach requires a level of detail that is often not easily accessible to agencies. As you can see below, in much less dense areas the impact of not accounting for driveways can be pretty critical and often greater than the loss on the arterial to begin with.
Transit Stops
Bus stops are another common curb asset impacting parking availability . Similar to driveways, bus stops often don’t show up on parking sign-only maps. It’s not that they aren’t clearly demarcated but because often the signs are owned by other agencies and not cross-referenced in the same database. In INRIX’s investigation of SDOT publicly available maps, we found many areas where bus stops were inconsistently accounted for in parking maps.
As you can see in the map below, the City clearly shows several bus zones on Westlake Ave, but smaller bus zones on Denny Way are not accounted for.
Again, in Google Street View you can see this area on Denny is a bus zone.
While it may not seem that important to drivers, it is critical for a broad array of curb management. That’s why CDS has included User Classes in the metadata associated with a curb zone, which lets you know which type of users can access this area whether it be buses, in-street bike corrals, bikeshare stations, or a shared mobility zone.
Clear Zones
The City of Hoboken (NJ) has been heralded for its incredible road safety achievement – zero road deaths in the last 7 years. Amongst the many reasons for Hoboken’s success is their Vision Zero mindset around curb management, including daylighting a crossing clear zones — also known as “Extended Parking Zones” — where there is no parking within 15 to 25 feet of an intersection to create better visibility.
As you can see from the signage in Google Street View below, many of these locations are demarcated by paint, not signs. Take a close look at the sign, it contains policies for the entire block, not the specific Extended Parking Zone.
Again, why is this important? It’s critical that this type of information be communicated to drivers and companies that use the right of way and both in detail and at scale. In California, the State Legislature passed a new Daylighting Law that requires that all zones within 20 feet of crosswalk be free of parked cars regardless of if it is signed, painted, or neither. Having digital tools that can not only communicate this, but do so quickly and at scale is critical to achieve Vision Zero goals.
The intersection at Clay St and Polk St in San Francisco shown below has a clear zone that is marked with red paint by SFMTA but not with signs. INRIX Curb Analytics shows the extent of the “No Parking” area regardless of the way it’s communicated to the public.
Time of Day Changes
One final issue beyond parking rules segmentation is communication. One of the main reasons industry experts cite for digitizing curb rules is because they can be so confusing in certain areas. Below is an image next to our old office in the City of Santa Monica.
Signs like this are incredibly confusing to everyone which is another reason digital policies are a great step forward. Including accurate information on time-of-day restrictions that are not only usable in a web interface with a calendar but that can be called on demand and machine readable in a standardized format like CDS are critical for not only the general driving public today but also to help autonomous vehicles and businesses better plan and guide their fleets.
Solutions
There are many companies that offer bookends of the spectrum when it comes to mapping. On one end, there are companies using incredibly expensive lidar-based scanners that provide an unnecessary centimeter level of curb space details or use labor-intensive consulting models with billable hours to map your city beyond signs. On the other end, companies offer visualization tools to quickly load your sign data which creates an incomplete/inaccurate inventory that can’t be relied upon by the stakeholders for most use cases.
The problem with the labor-intensive solutions is that they are expensive (and time consuming) to collect once and often are very quickly out of date. In the case of visualization tools, even if they are supplemented by a thorough data collection effort, cities are responsible to maintain their records or forced to hire similar consultants to maintain the records with the same billable hours model. For city agencies that try to develop a fully in-house model, they have to overcome challenges of different operating approaches between departments that maintain records, asset management systems, private developers and contractor changes to the curb, and major capital projects.
Curb Analytics has addressed the shortcomings of the above approaches through a sustainable business model. We not only collect data about parking and curbside inventories, provide analytic tools (100% collected and ready to go on Day 1 in more than 125 cities in the US and Europe) and display it in a software-as-a-service solution, but we also maintain it in a data-as-a-service model. Additionally, we can leverage various datasets and information, in a variety of formats, that cities provide to keeps cost down. For example, we are ingesting SFMTA’s sign, curb paint, and bike parking inventories to ensure that information is reflected and kept up to date with their maintenance records.
This approach gives cities a belt and suspenders approach where they are able to provide proactive updates into the system about completed and upcoming changes but also have the back-up of INRIX expertise to ensure that data is accurate when tested against ground truth on the street (and we have the testing results to prove it!). We are able to do this because we have dozens of existing customers in the enterprise and consumer spaces that require the data to stay up to date and also provide feedback into our system. This means that the costs of collecting and maintaining the data are shared amongst the wide range of customers so that we can deliver our product at a competitive rate versus doing one time collection (our annual subscription fee is a fraction of the cost of the labor to translate sign data and then collect the additional data beyond signs). It also means that public agencies are not just buying an internal facing planning and operations process product, but rather a public-private ecosystem already in use by the private sector and existing drivers.