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Tag: curb access

T4America selects 3 cities to launch curbside management pilots

The three pilot cities. From left: Boston, Bellevue, and Minneapolis

WASHINGTON, DC – Transportation for America (T4America) is thrilled to announce that it has awarded three cities with funding and support to complete curbside management pilot projects. The three cities are Bellevue, WA; Boston, MA; and Minneapolis, MN. 

The awards are a new component of T4America’s Smart Cities Collaborative. Now in its third cohort, the Collaborative is a year-long program for public sector transportation leaders to share their experiences with new mobility technologies and develop best practices to ensure that these services improve city life. 

“The demands on curb space are rapidly increasing, but the policies and tools on how to share this limited resource are not, said Beth Osborne, director of Transportation for America. “We’re excited to work with these three cities to put what we’ve learned from the past two cohorts into practice and identify best practices and guidelines for better curbside management.”

T4America believes that peer-learning is the most valuable part of the Smart Cities Collaborative, which is why the three “pilot cities” will be joined by participants from over 10 other cities. The final list of cities participating as these “peer cities” will be announced next week. 

“We are proud to be selected as one of only three cities nationwide focusing on how to best manage curbside space so that it meets the current and future needs of all users of city streets,” said Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh. “I am encouraged that several of our recent efforts, such as piloting pick up and drop off space for rideshares and implementing performance parking, proved Boston’s willingness to find innovative solutions to our transportation challenges and helped to secure our participation in this joint effort.”  

“With rapidly increasing job and population growth in Bellevue, managing the city’s curbside space is becoming increasingly important,” said Transportation Director Andrew Singelakis. “Participating in the Smart Cities Collaborative will help us meet this challenge. We’re honored to be selected as a pilot city and grateful for the strong support we received from King County Metro, Bellevue Downtown Association, Bellevue Chamber of Commerce and others.”

“Minneapolis is proud to continue our partnership with T4America and the Smart Cities Collaborative, which has helped us develop capacity to harness technology to reach our transportation goals, “ said Robin Hutcheson, Minneapolis Public Works Director. “We are excited to be selected as one of three pilot cities in the 2020 cohort.  With this partnership and assistance we will develop and implement strategies to address the changing nature of curbside use, as well as learn from and share our learnings with the other participating cities.”

The third round will officially begin in February 2020. Learn more about the Smart Cities Collaborative. 

How should cities price access to their curb spaces and right-of-way?

The second year of our Smart Cities Collaborative—which launched today with 22 cities—will examine how emerging technologies and new mobility options are reshaping the right-of-way and curb space via four key topics. Our fourth and final post taking a quick look at these topics is about how pricing strategies can be employed in service of a city’s long-term outcomes.

Year two of T4America’s Smart Cities Collaborative will explore how emerging technologies and new mobility options are reshaping the right-of-way and curb space. Our content and curriculum will be separated into four sub-topics; design, measure, manage, and price. This fourth topic will examine how cities can begin to determine the value of their assets and price them accordingly in an effort to achieve their long-term outcomes. Read about the launch of the Collaborative and the 22 cities selected to participate.

PRICE

As much as urban dwellers have come to rely on app-based ridesourcing services or bikesharing systems, it’s hard to grasp sometimes just how much has changed with urban mobility in such a short period of time. Ten years ago, most cities had what we’d all consider as pretty simple menu of options: Taxis. Personally owned automobilies and bicycles. Public buses and trains. Commuter rail and bus. Your own two feet.

But as new mobility options such as ridesharing, ridesourcing, microtransit, dockless bikesharing and more have entered cities, they’ve placed new demands on the right-of-way and curb space. Since their arrival, cities have struggled to effectively manage private providers and adapt to these new modes. As we explored in our manage post, the time is overdue to explore new management strategies for these assets.

Flickr photo by Daniel Lobo. https://www.flickr.com/photos/daquellamanera/38503203635/

With this increasing level of demand for access, many cities have begun to recognize that streets and curbs are some of their most valuable assets—assets they have largely been giving away for free. At the same time, new mobility models and the coming wave of automated vehicles also threaten the viability of various revenue streams at the federal, state and local level. Though this makes new pricing mechanisms attractive solutions to future revenue shortfalls, they can and should be designed as demand management tools first, with new revenue a secondary benefit.

Before cities can begin charging for use, they need to have a better sense of value.

Today, there is no formula or standard for how to determine this value and many are wildly inconsistent when it comes to pricing access to their streets, curbs and sidewalks. Cities charge (often not enough) for curb use for parking, but don’t charge ridesourcing or delivery vehicles using similar space, even as these services are often having greater impacts on congestion and safety. Similarly, cities charge street vendors to set up on the sidewalk, but not for dockless bikeshare or newspaper boxes occupying the space directly next to it.

Without a framework to detemine the actual costs and value of these assets, it’s impossible to appropriately charge for their use and thus difficult to effectively and consistently manage demand and access across modes, departments and use cases.

This year, with the 22 participating cities, the Collaborative will endeavor to get a handle on all the different users of these spaces, which departments are managing the various pieces and how they’re currently valuing their use. To assess the full value of these assets, we’ll nail down expenses associated with building this infrastructure (like concrete, steel and street furniture), evaluate the long-term maintenance costs and examine how these spaces can affect areas of concern, such as congestion, safety and pollution.

Once we develop a better understanding of costs and impacts we can start to develop a formula and derive appropriate pricing levels across modes and departments. We’ll begin with streets, curbs and sidewalks, but our goal is to help cities understand how to measure value and then subsequently price their resources appropriately so they can transfer this to other assets, such as data or vehicle-to-infrastructure technology.

The Collaborative will also explore the various hurdles that come along with developing and implementing pricing strategies—technological, financial and political. We’ll review messaging strategies that have gone wrong and how successful cities have focused the public conversation on behavior change and affecting long-term outcomes such as reducing congestion, vehicle miles traveled, emissions, and creating safer streets.

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