Municipal adaptation to changing curbside demands: Exploratory findings from semi-structured interviews with ten US cities

Emerging mobility services (e.g., ridehailing, e-commerce, micromobility, etc.) are generating novel and rapidly growing demands to use curbside space, with potentially large impacts on mobility, energy consumption, and related outcomes. This presents both opportunities and challenges to municipal agencies responsible for managing this interface between the road network and adjacent land uses, as legacy practices require updating. In this study, we employ a semistructured interviewing approach to establish how municipalities are adapting to these new pressures on their curbside. We interviewed senior staff responsible for curbside policy of ten large U.S. municipalities with populations ranging from similar to 250,000 to similar to 5,000,000, the majority of which are the central cities of their respective metropolitan regions. We document a trend of organizational restructuring to more formally include curbside management teams, with the majority of interviewees also reporting increased staffing. Respondents reported that operational failures at their curbside (e.g., demand in excess of capacity) have impacts on safety, capacity, and emergency vehicle mobility, with impacts highly concentrated spatially and temporally (e.g., late evenings in nightlife districts). We document a diversity of data flows between ridehailing operators (e.g., Uber, Lyft) and municipalities, with some cities reporting obtaining types of data that other cities report not receiving despite requesting such data. Finally, respondents consistently expressed a desire for new data streams and methodologies to help manage the curbside of the future. It is hoped that establishing the state of the practice in this rapidly changing context will be of use to practitioners facing similar pressures as those of our interviewees.