A handful of cities are taking bold moves to prepare for autonomous vehicles while also easing the hotly-contested areas around curb spaces.
Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Fort Lauderdale are among the cities piloting alternate uses at various times of the day for what curbs can be used for – Ubers and Lyfts, Fed Ex and UPS trucks, personal vehicles, bikeshare stations, and more.
The curbside has always been a a place for walking and loitering. But in just the past decade, smartphone technology has enabled new transportation services, all of them looking for their own bit of the terrain.
“Cities have started to rethink how their streets are designed from curb from curb,” says Matthew Roe, who directs street design initiatives for the National Association of City Transportation Officials and authored a new curbside management white paper released this week. “They’ve started to realize they need more tools to manage that valuable curbside space. It’s the most valuable space that a city owns and one of the most underutilized.”
In October, Washington rolled out a year-long pilot program modeled on the concept of flex-space. Monday through Thursday, a stretch of Connecticut Avenue in the busy Dupont Circle neighborhood is a great place to shop or grab lunch. Thursday through Sunday, 10 pm to 7 pm, it’s one of the most zoo-like nightlife spots in the District.
That’s why the city reserves four blocks on those evenings for ridehailing pick-up and drop-off zones. “Folks were spilling out into the travel lane,” says Evian Patterson, the DC Department of Transportation’s director of parking and ground transportation. Now, just a few months on, he says the city has seen safety improvements. The traffic has gotten better, too. San Francisco and Fort Lauderdale have similar pilots in the works.
“If every personal car space were converted to a pick-up or drop-off, or every personal car trip were converted to a shared ride, you would need a lot less space overall because you’re not storing cars—you’re dynamically moving people in and out,” says Andrew Salzberg, who heads up transportation policy at Uber. “You have the opportunity to do a lot off interesting things: sidewalks cafes, parks, space for bike share, wider sidewalks.”
Or, faster transportation overall. In 2015, Chicago’s government reserved curbside lanes on a major downtown thoroughfare for buses only, painting them a bright red. In the following year, moving and stoping violations on the road fell. Standing and parking violations almost disappeared. Bus riders were getting to where they needed to go, closer to on time — and so was everyone else.
Of course, there is always a catch. This time, it’s funding. Cities like Washington make big bucks off charging for personal car-related expenses, through parking meters, parking permits, and traffic violations. Figure it out, cities, because the future beckons. The curb is only going to get more important, as even newer tech like self-driving vehicles start driving themselves over the horizon.
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