🎉 Curb data standard released and ready for use

We’re pleased to announce the release of CurbLR version 1.0.

CurbLR is an open, linear-referenced data standard for curb regulations, developed by SharedStreets in partnership with Ford Mobility’s UK-based team. It provides a way for cities to collect and share curb information in a consistent format, which can then be consumed by tools, apps, and platforms.

Cities can collect information about parking signs and meters and convert them into a standardized CurbLR feed. When cities use a common data format, it’s easy for them to plug into common mapping and analysis tools, like this parking rules map created by Saadiq Mohiuddin.

Earlier this summer, we announced our foray into curbspace and presented a draft spec as a starting place for discussions with city staff, corporate entities, and interested individuals. Based on this feedback, we made several changes to the spec. We’ve just released CurbLR 1.0 on Github as a stable version that’s ready for use!

What’s new

• More efficient structure. CurbLR now stores multiple regulations per feature geometry, to prevent redundancy
• More robust payment profiles. The payment structure can now hold flat, tiered, or incrementing rates that vary based on time of day, length of stay, or particular timespans
• Additional data fields. We’ve added new, optional fields (like the angle of parking bays or number of spaces) that can be used for routing and analysis
• Dotting our i’s. Semantic changes make the spec more understandable; predictable and consistent arrays and formats have been introduced for certain fields.
• Complex examples. We’ve added complex, real-world examples of signs translated into CurbLR to help users understand how the spec works and how to process their data.
• New pre-processing tools. Updates to the SharedStreets command line tool make it easier to create CurbLR location information. New documentation explains how users can snap point-based data to the street and convert it into street segments based on asset relationships or variable-width buffers.

Getting started

We’ve posted a CurbLR feed of 50,000 parking regulations for commercial districts in Los Angeles, based on GIS data from the city’s open data portal. You can use this dataset as a starting point for creating tools or experimenting with the spec.

Please reach out if you’re interested in creating a CurbLR feed for your city, or wondering how your company can work with this data — we’d love to connect with you!

What’s next

More city datasets will be coming soon, as well as an interactive map viewer that lets users explore CurbLR feeds for different cities. We’ll also explore ways to integrate transaction and session data into future versions of CurbLR.

We’re excited to share this new release, and we look forward to cities and companies using it to produce and share information about the curb.