Tag: curbside management

Transportation for America’s 2020 cohort of the Smart Cities Collaborative was always meant to focus on curbside management. But then came COVID-19, radically shifting all aspects of our lives—including how we use curbs. Our new report, COVID and the Curb, explores how cities adapted their curb management strategies to support public health and small businesses, and ideas for better curb policy at the local, state, and federal levels. 

A Shared Spaces street in San Francisco, organized by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency.

Over the past few years, demands for curb space have skyrocketed. No longer just for personal car parking, curbs are where people board buses or streetcars; access app-based shared bicycles, scooters, or cars; and host block parties or parklets. Businesses send out and pick up deliveries at the curb, and unhoused community members, often without other options, use curbs as temporary living spaces.

In 2020, the curb was used for all those purposes and more. Local governments got creative to align curbside management with COVID-19 response efforts—at the same time the pandemic was accelerating some of the changing uses of and growing demand on the curb already underway. 

Click the image to read the full report.

Across the country, a number of cities reprogrammed curb and street space for retail, outdoor dining, and active transportation; working with communities to design curb pilots; and setting up temporary transit lanes and COVID-19 testing sites. Due to the urgent nature of the crisis, cities developed new approaches to a number of challenges (many rooted in issues that existed far before COVID-19) that should be revisited post-pandemic. We explored many of these new approaches in our new report, COVID and the Curb. 

The challenge to adapt curbside management to COVID-19 raised a host of questions for cities. How do you balance equitable community engagement with pressure to provide quick solutions? How do you revise permitting processes—like for outdoor dining—to be less arduous and more equitable? How do you clearly communicate new regulations and processes as they’re being changed and implemented?

These questions were made all the more significant because of the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on certain communities, particularly Black people, Indigenous people, and other people of color. In response, cities across the country piloted new solutions, swapped use cases with peers, stayed as nimble as possible, and reassessed how government assets could better and more equitably serve the public during this crisis.

Here’s what some cities did: 

• The City of Boston waived and reduced outdoor dining permit requirements, which previously involved surveyed and engineered design drawings, a public hearing, multi-departmental permitting, and fees. The majority of these requirements were either waived or reduced, and the review and approval process was expedited to take a matter of weeks, rather than months.
• In Ann Arbor, city staff developed a “parking space repurposing” program to allow 40 restaurants to use the on-street parking spaces in front of their properties for extended patio space at no cost to businesses. 
• In San Francisco, as traffic started to slowly return after the initial lockdown, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) set up temporary transit lanes to ensure “that essential workers and transit-dependent San Franciscans do not bear the costs of traffic congestion.” By devoting lanes solely for buses, SFMTA reduced the amount of time buses spend in traffic, protecting public health by reducing riders’ travel time and hence their potential exposure to COVID-19.
• …and more case studies featured in COVID and the Curb. 

Looking to the future of curb space

With residents, elected officials, and small business owners paying closer attention to the curb and how it can be strategically leveraged for the public’s benefit, cities now have a unique opportunity to shift management of their curbs in a way that’s equitable, flexible and innovative. Cities can set up curb guidelines to prioritize curb uses, ensure curb signage is understandable and accessible,  and address inequitable curb enforcement—and much, much more. 

While curb management largely occurs at the local level, there are a handful of policy actions states and the federal government can take to support local governments’ ability to efficiently and equitably manage their curb. For example, providing additional regulatory oversight on delivery vehicles and TNCs, and requiring data sharing between private operators and cities. 

Go deeper in these case studies and  policy ideas in our new report, COVID and the Curb. 

A service lane in the Cleveland Park neighborhood in Washington, DC.

This post is part of a special series on curb management and COVID-19. A joint effort of the Institute for Parking and Mobility, Transportation for America, and the Institute of Transportation Engineer’s Complete Streets Council, this series strives to document the immediate curbside-related actions and responses to COVID-19, as well as create a knowledge base of strategies that communities can use to manage the curbside during future emergencies. Check out the last post. 

By Benito O. Pérez, AICP CTP, CPM; and David Carson Lipscomb, MCP

For all of us, 2020 will be the year the world changed. Seemingly overnight the hustle and bustle of life and commerce in our cities went nearly silent under government-mandated shelter-in-place orders aimed to stop the spread of COVID-19. Overwhelmed healthcare networks and essential businesses that help meet our most basic needs were thrown into crisis. This is a common reality after natural disasters like hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods. However, unlike those events, this is simultaneously a prolonged and global experience.

Municipal governments are vital to protecting our communities, tasked with coordinating resources to address this public health emergency while maintaining order and normalcy for residents. Curbside and parking professionals across the country have supported their municipal responses by ensuring prioritized, optimal transportation network operations in innovative, rapid-response ways including the following.

• Restaurant pick-up zones. With dine-in operations banned, restaurants shifted to takeout/delivery models resulting in congestion at the curb for customers and couriers. Originating in Seattle and propagating rapidly across the country, municipalities reprogrammed segments of their curbside with temporary signage coupled with information campaigns (like the District of Columbia map) showing curbs prioritized for pick-up activity. This ensured curb turnover while supporting local restaurants.
• Relaxed curbside enforcement. Shelter-in-place orders led to more stationary vehicles, which put them in violation of policies encouraging turnover. Cities like Miami, Pittsburgh, and others relaxed parking enforcement to discourage unnecessary community movement.
• Suspended parking space payment. Some communities suspended parking payment, though they did not make that decision lightly. In many jurisdictions, parking revenue is the operational funding lifeblood of their organizations. For the District, it’s about 10 percent of its annual contribution to the regional transportation system. However, costs to maintain parking payment far outweighed anticipated revenue. Additionally, reducing potential sources of infection, i.e., parking payment kiosks, was also of concern for municipal operators.
• Prioritized/designated essential service provider parking. Hospitals have been the front lines of this pandemic, with many facilities converting off-street parking lots and garages to triage and community testing sites. With limited public transportation services and scarce access to for-hire vehicles as drivers limit their exposure, some healthcare providers are resorting to private vehicles. With on-site parking gone, municipalities have designated curbsides near medical facilities for healthcare facility employees. New York City has issued healthcare provider parking permits to allow them to park wherever is most convenient. This may become an extended concern for other essential service staff in dense, urban areas with limited transit.
• Expanded sidewalks. In urban areas in particular, sidewalks are constrained by historical rights of way. That means there may be sidewalks narrower than the minimum six feet recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s “physical distancing” guidelines. Places like New York City have cleared the curb, if not the entire roadway, to facilitate unimpeded, “physically distant” pedestrian routes.

These are but a few strategies that are part of cohesive and holistic community responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. If you have a good story, please share it with benito.perez@dc.gov. 

Benito O. Pérez is the curbside management operations planning manager at the District Department of Transportation in Washington, D.C.

David C. Lipscomb is a curbside management planner at the District Department of Transportation in Washington, D.C.

This blog is part of a special series on curb management and COVID-19. A joint effort of Institute for Parking and Mobility, Transportation for America, and the Institute of Transportation Engineers, this series strives to document the immediate curbside-related actions and responses to COVID-19, as well as create a knowledge base of strategies that communities can use to manage the curbside during future emergencies.

There is an enduring human spirit that persists in crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic has put that spirit to the test, forging stronger bonds within and between our communities, our industries, our nation, and our humanity. Lately, I have been struck by how closely connected we all are.

I don’t need to tell you how strange, trying, and scary these weeks have been. But what you might not know is while everyone was figuring out how to work from home, keep their business afloat, or protect their loved ones, professionals across the parking and mobility industry were hard at work trying to support those activities. 

Our communities are normally test beds for ongoing transportation innovation, but this pandemic has accelerated the need for creative use of our resources and emphasizes the importance of collaboration between colleagues. Although every community has unique features, hopefully practices that work well in one community rapidly multiply across the country. The past few weeks have seen that concept accelerate to hyper speed.

As communities enacted new policies to protect citizens by minimizing the spread of the coronavirus, their parking and mobility programs adapted curb management and parking policies to address emerging priorities. Rapid installation of temporary loading zones for restaurant curbside pickup and paid parking and enforcement policy changes to help homebound residents were needed to support business and residential communities. Supportive parking policies for healthcare and other essential workers were critical to ensuring safe, efficient, and quick access to parking as hospitals expanded triage areas into their parking lots.

Behind these changes was an amazing network of professionals connecting in rapid fashion to share ideas, discuss challenges, and offer support. A few resources that truly helped to connect folks included:

• City groups functioning through International Parking and Mobility Institute (IPMI), the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE), and Transportation for America’s 2020 Smart Cities Collaborative came together in a grassroots fashion to help discuss, test, implement, monitor, and triage curbside changes. Through a variety of channels – emails, Slack, and good old phone calls – policies implemented on one side of the country quickly made to the other side. 
• The IPMI Forum, an online IPMI member resource, provided a place for professionals to ask questions, compare ideas, and discuss how to adapt policy. As bigger cities created their policies, they trickled down through this network.
• Transportation for America’s Smart Cities Collaborative Slack channel provided a simple, effective forum for member cities to discuss and share responses and solutions to COVID-19. 
  • Smart Cities Collaborative member Chris Iverson from the City of Bellevue, Wash., shared that, “Once restaurants were mandated to shift to delivery and pick-up operations only, we reached out to the Collaborative to see what curbside best practices other cities were implementing. It helped immensely that everyone in the Slack channel was already focused on curbside management practices, and the transition to crisis mode was made easier with the help of the Collaborative.”
• The National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) launched a Transportation Resource Center public tool for cities to share information and develop effective responses to this evolving global crisis. It provides actionable examples of how cities around the world are addressing critical tasks, such as:
  • Helping healthcare and other essential workers get safely where they’re needed while protecting transit operators and frontline staff.
  • Creating pick-up/delivery zones to ensure that residents can access food and essential goods.
  • Managing public space to encourage physical distancing.
  • Deploying effective public communications and signage.
• The American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials (AASHTO) is collecting a variety of transportation data to assist in understanding recent changes to travel of people and goods in response to COVID-19

Collectively, this network helped keep businesses running, supported stay-at-home orders, and facilitated the needs of healthcare systems. In a joint effort, IPMI, Transportation for America, ITE, and other partner organizations are documenting these actions and their impacts. They plan to provide summary blogs, articles, and peer reviewed white papers to help communities understand, plan, mitigate, and forge ahead through future emergencies.

If you have a good story, please share it with brett@woodsolutionsgroup.com. 

Brett Wood, CAPP, PE, is president of Wood Solutions Group.