Curbside Management Resources
What is Curbside Management?
With the increasing concern for balancing the needs for all roadway users, and the growth of transportation network companies (TNCs) like Uber and Lyft, as well as online shopping and associated deliveries, demand for curbside pickups, drop-offs and dwell times is growing dramatically. Curbside Management seeks to inventory, optimize, allocate, and manage curbspaces to maximize mobility and access for the wide variety of curb demands. Potential users of the curbside include:.
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Drivers, both TNC and non-TNC |
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Parked vehicles and electric vehicle (EV) charging |
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Bicycles and bicycle infrastructure |
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Pedestrians and crossing infrastructure |
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Couriers and delivery vehicles |
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Local businesses |
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Mobile vendors |
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Transit and transit infrastructure |
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ADA access |
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Emergency services |
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Taxis, transportation network companies (TNCs), and shuttles |
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Parklets and streetscape |
The ITE Effort
The ITE Complete Streets Council developed the Guide for local jurisdictions on how to inventory, assess, enhance, and prioritize curb spaces to meet the multimodal demands at the curb in a safe and efficient way. The Practitioner’s Guide addresses key gaps in existing curbside guidance:
- How to measure curbside performance
- How to identify and resolve trade-off considerations
- How to explain the value of curb uses to stakeholders
The guide considers regulatory, operations, and technology strategies to optimize curb access and usage, and features case studies for quick reference.
The guide was assembled based on an initial white paper by the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO), case study surveys of NACTO and ITE members, as well as presentations and workshops at key conferences in 2017/2018.
Case Studies
NACTO's Transit Focused Guidance
In May 2017, NACTO released a draft white paper, Curb Appeal: Curbside Management Strategies for Improving Transit Reliability. Revised in August 2017 after a peer review process, the white paper profiles cities across the United States that are managing curbspace to prioritize high capacity on street modes. The cities are using five broad approaches:
- Strategically using curbside space to prioritize transit movement (featuring Seattle’s right-of-way policy);
- Managing other curbside users to clear the way for transit (featuring Brooklyn’s commercial loading and delivery zones);
- Measuring how a street works to most effectively manage it (featuring San Francisco’s SFpark dynamic parking pilot);
- Using curbsides to prioritize transit movement (featuring red bus lanes in Chicago and San Francisco and peak hour transit lanes in Brooklyn); and
- Looking beyond the corridor and beyond the curb at larger city-wide strategies (featuring parking strategies in Austin and Portland).
The paper set the stage for the conference discussions that followed, providing presentation material and a framework for gap identification, strategy selection, and prioritization. The final document is available online here: https://nacto.org/tsdg/curb-appeal-whitepaper/.
Library
ITE 2018 Annual Meeting: Minneapolis
NACTO and the ITE Complete Streets Council presented the new ITE Curbside Management Practitioner's Resource Guide at the ITE 2018 Annual Meeting in Minneapolis. The session included the following objectives:
- Describe the basic elements associated with a comprehensive curbside management process
- Identify current practitioner resources and learning materials to facilitate improved curbside management
- Compare curbside challenges faced by other cities and public agencies with their own jurisdiction.
TRB Annual Meeting 2018: Washington, DC
With the increasing demand for curb space in urban areas and suburban centers, transportation professionals face challenges providing a safe, efficient, and effective system that moves freight and passengers and accommodates transit, transportation network companies, deliveries, parking, pedestrians, and bicyclists. What happens at the curb is important to the planning, funding, design, operations, and maintenance of a safe and efficient transportation system. The workshop was co-sponsored by the Institute of Transportation Engineers and the National Association of City Transportation Officials.
View more details in the flyer here.
NACTO 2017 Designing Cities Conference: Chicago
This session featured case studies from New York City, Washington, DC, and Seattle. These cities are capturing more value out of their curbs – keeping travel lanes moving, and more efficiently using street space to meet city goals. The speakers shared new approaches to curbside management including deliveries, loading zones, drop-off points, and shifted timetables, that are helping them get ahead of the increasing demand for deliveries and shared mobility services. The NACTO transit-focused white paper and draft results from the ITE and NACTO member surveys were also presented. For more details click here.
ITE 2017 Annual Meeting: Toronto
The 2017 ITE Annual Meeting featured two curbside management sessions sponsored by the ITE Complete Streets Council, a podium session and a half-day workshop.
Podium Session
The podium session included presentations from NACTO and the cities of Victoria, BC; Toronto, ON; and Coquitlam, BC, regarding the need for and solutions they are pursuing in curbside management.
Workshop
The afternoon workshop featured a presentation on the NACTO transit-focused white paper and a series of “pecha kucha” short presentations from attendees on their key issues or preferred curbside management strategies. Attendees then joined small groups to discuss a curbside management case study in Rosslyn, Virginia, and provided input on strategies and priorities for a study area near the Metro station. The Rosslyn case study was envisioned as the building block for the practitioner’s guide, where strategies can be defined, and tradeoffs identified and measured.
