If you missed it, it was designated as the roadside year by Sabrina Sussman, Zipcar’s public partnership manager, in 2018. This is because competition for limited curb space has become increasingly fierce in the past few years, especially in cities.
The roadside is where the “channel” is provided between the street and the sidewalk. This definition tends to include lanes for parking lots, bus stops, taxi pick-ups and drop-offs, and roadsides for loading and unloading goods.
But containment competition is increasing from a range of new users, including: car sharing, car sharing, electric motorcycle share, bike share and e-bike share, food delivery, online order delivery, and autonomous vehicles for years to come.
The recent report of the Association of Transportation Engineers, the International Transport Forum and the National Association of Urban Transport Officers (NACTO) highlights the growing concern about roadsides.
With this new series of users, cities need to rethink how they manage this controversial real estate. Without better curb management, cities will face more and more congestion on local streets, which enter the roadside through vehicles and travel from a series of sidewalks that share mobile equipment.
In order to accommodate these new users, one change the city needs to make is to reuse the curb space traditionally used for parking for other purposes. This change is likely to have a significant financial impact.
According to a survey of the 25 largest cities in the United States, the total revenue associated with parking in 2016 was $5 billion, or about $129. While reusing roadside space does not affect all of this revenue, it has an impact on the city’s budget. To minimize this impact, cities need to consider whether and how to charge new users of roadside space.
To manage restrictions, first determine the purpose
Seattle is one of the leaders in roadside management. The city divides roadside use into six main functions:
Mobility of travel lanes, bicycle lanes and bus lanes
People using bus stops, bicycle parking areas and loading areas can use
Get goods to provide goods
Activate small parks, food trucks and public art
Green planting, rain gardens and biological depression
Parking, bus parking and construction.
The first in-depth analysis of the roadside was San Francisco. As part of a study commissioned by Uber Technologies in 2018, consultants (Fehr and Peers) developed a Roadside Productivity Index (CPI). The index considers three things to compare the productivity of roadside use.
Number of passengers using curb space by mode
Observing the time period of the activity
The total space dedicated to this use.
How to calculate curb productivity
The consumer price index is a useful way to quantify the various competitive uses of roadsides.
It is calculated by dividing the amount of activity by the amount of space used multiplied by the time unit. For example, a CPI for a bus stop with a 45-meter roadside for more than 4 hours for 250 arriving and departing passengers would be: 250 passengers/(45 meters x 4 hours), or 1.39 passengers/meter-hour.
Alternatively, the CPI for a 5 meter long roadside car space would be: 2 passengers / (5 meters x 4 hours), or 0.1 passengers per meter – hour.
The Consumer Price Index shows that the bus station’s stay time is 13.9 times higher than the parking lot (1.39 / 0.1).
The analysis of usage data provides some rigor for the development of roadside management plans.
Basic management of ‘myth measurement’
As a way forward, Fehr and Peer recommend a three-component management strategy:
Relocate existing roadside use to other areas
Conversion, including eliminating some current uses and replacing them with new uses
Flexibility, so curb changes based on the time of day.
Washington, DC, San Francisco and Fort Lauderdale are conducting flexible roadside management experiments.
In changing the roadside management approach, the 2018 report from the National Association of Urban Transport Officials of North America recommended a “measure myth” strategy when converting parking lots to other uses.
The arrival mode survey has consistently shown that public transport and active travel modes provide more proximity to corporate customers for private cars. Previous and subsequent studies have confirmed that replacing parking with public transport or bicycle lanes has increased the sales of regional businesses.
While new mobile startups are part of a city that needs to develop a restricted management plan, other startups are developing new ways to manage this increasingly competitive space. Some of these new companies include:
Coord’s open curb from sidewalk spin, providing wheelchair cutting, fire hydrants, bus stops and other physical roadside assets
Populus, a San Francisco transportation company, has developed a mobile manager that provides data on shared parking data for electric scooters and electric bikes.
Remix has developed the New Mobility tool to analyze and visualize data streams.
These startups have raised millions of dollars, in part because of recognized value.
Cities need to travel from parking cities to pick-up/drop cities and flexible cities. To do this, cities need to think strategically about how to manage their limits through the emergence of new users and new mobility management options.
The first step in this transition is for cities to ensure the establishment of data standards and data sharing arrangements as part of the basis for giving new users access to roadside permits.