The future of curb space is about much more than parking
A Sidewalk Talk Q&A with Coord CEO Stephen Smyth.
This Sidewalk Talk Q&A is part of a series of conversations with leaders at Sidewalk Labs incubated and portfolio companies.
Some of us accept the need to do a little math when the check comes at a restaurant. Stephen Smyth does his math while he’s still eating.
Last summer, as New York City’s economy was reopening from the pandemic, Smyth and his family were having dinner at a curbside dining setup that had formerly been a parking space. So Smyth crunched some numbers as he chewed his food. Soon he realized that the amount of money the city would generate in tax revenue from this dinner was a lot more than the money it would have generated from a parked car.
“The pandemic has essentially redefined how we look at street space — not just curb space — and with a fresh set of eyes,” says Smyth, CEO of the curb-management company Coord, a Sidewalk Labs spinout. “More and more people sort of doing this kind of equation, if you will, or this math, is I think broadly healthy. It challenges the old way of doing things, recognizes that curb space is more than just for parking cars.”
Smyth spoke to Sidewalk Talk editors Eric Jaffe and Vanessa Quirk about all the ways Coord is helping cities make the most of their busier-than-ever curbs, including a recent pilot with Aspen, Colorado, to help manage truck traffic. Watch a video of our conversation above or read an edited transcript below.
Vanessa: We are now joined by Stephen Smyth. He is the co-founder and CEO of Coord, a Sidewalk Labs spinout company that provides curb management solutions for fast changing cities. Stephen, thank you so much for joining us.
Stephen: Thanks Vanessa. Thanks Eric for having me.
Eric: Stephen — thanks for joining us. For those who don’t know, can you talk about what Coord does and what your mission is?
When we started the company, a little over four years ago, the basic problem that we saw in the world, which we predicted would continue to get worse, was essentially demand for space, on city streets in particular, far outstripping supply. And so, it’s sort of a two-fold problem. Not just scale — like more vehicles every year, that’s been happening every year I’ve been alive — but really more interestingly one of scope. So, different shapes and sizes of vehicles. Obviously, in that time, scooters have become a thing, for example, as well as many other form factors. But basically on the same physical space, you have scooters competing with semi-trucks doing store replenishments, and more and more of both. And that’s not a recipe for success.
And then you have different operating models, which impacts, again, how the space is being used. So ride-hail vehicles pulling over with very little notice, for example, nevermind scooters, and bikes, and electric bikes, for that matter, going at 25 miles an hour. So a lot of counterintuitive new behaviors happening and hard-to-predict things happening, as well as of course technological change, right? There’s a lot of talk about autonomy, clearly, but even more prosaically, 5G connected vehicles, et cetera. So a ton of change happening on that front too even, in the years since we’ve been in existence.
So we set about essentially solving that problem, big picture. Not just using technology — cloud computing, machine learning, et cetera — but also pricing as sort of two key components or two key ingredients to basically helping cities in the end, because that’s who owns the land legally, to do a better job of allocating this scarce resource in real time to its best use, according to the policy goals of the city. So, that’s really kind of the founding idea.
Vanessa: I know that recently you released a case study on the first 100 days of a Smart Zone pilot program in Aspen, Colorado. My understanding is that this pilot had to do a lot with unloading and loading zones for trucks on the curb. Can you talk to us a little bit more about that pilot and the results that you’ve seen so far?
We actually partnered also with Nelson/Nygaard, the well-known transportation consulting firm, to essentially evaluate our work so that we would get a somewhat outside perspective or objective view of the project. And so, based on that, the data, of course, that we created with our own system, we created this case study. It’s 20 pages. I encourage everyone interested to read it. You can download it from Coord.com.
And basically we learned a few things. That fleets are on board. Over half the fleets that operate in the city adopted the program. It’s not just at the fleet level, but at the driver level, there was significant adoption as well. So — I’m just looking at my stats here — 53 percent adopted. Over 91 unique drivers completed over 1,020 loading sessions. For every 100 successful Smart Zone sessions, there were only three reports where a driver reported that the zone was unavailable. So, in 97 out of 100, it worked as expected. And so, that was obviously a concern or a question that we had for ourselves when we rolled out.
We also have a hold feature that enables the drivers to hold it in advance. And over a third of drivers took advantage of that. So, that’s basically a whole new idea, if you think about it in terms of using curb space. Typically, the way it works is you show up at your destination, and then you look around at the curb space, and what you can do there, and how you pay, and this, and that. And so, we wanted to give them the ability to know that in advance and actually route to maybe one that was around the corner, or in the alley behind, which was actually something that was really cool about this program as well, which we’ll talk about in a second.
Also what was really cool is that passenger pickups got faster. What happened was Uber drivers, et cetera, would pull over, pick up passengers in those spaces as well. They tended to linger. And so what we found which was fascinating is when they become Smart Zones — I’m just quoting the stat here — they spent 80 to 90 percent less time in those spaces doing passenger pickups. So there was more of a sense of scarcity: “this space is being used, it was of high value, don’t linger here if you’re passenger pickups, move along.” And so we got that turnover and that productivity going, which is really great to see.
And then I think the thing that people focus on the most in terms of impact was the reduction of double parking and efficiency in general. And so it’s always challenging to demonstrate that, but we started to show that in our work in the first 100 days, which was very gratifying, that we reduced the incidence rate of double parking, which is a leading cause of congestion.
So those are some of the key findings that we unearthed in the first 100 days. During that time, the city has expanded the program. We went from three months, we extended it now to an additional four, and we’ve added new spaces. We’ve also added alleys. So we had three or four initially, and we’ll be adding more alleys. And the alleys, we had a major impact in the alleys, which were, in many cities in America actually, alleys are used quite a bit for loading. And so it was an idea of the city brought to us. We initially had agreed on curbs, and we launched with a number of alleys, and we exceeded all expectations — our own and the city’s — in terms of helping the city to manage alley space more effectively.
So that’s why you do pilots, right? There’s a certain amount of things you expect to learn and reinforce, and then there’s surprises, right?
Eric: Obviously there’s a tremendous amount of collaboration involved with, with something like this. So how do you approach that partnership? You’re a private company. Obviously a public entity has different goals and different styles. Who does what? How do you determine the nature of that partnership?
I think a lot of the value that we offer, and I’m personally very excited about, is helping to share best practices faster. I remember reading a statistic in the New Yorker, probably 10 years ago now, about healthcare practices. And it said it took something like 15 years for half of the American hospitals to adopt a best practice. So there’s just a propagation time that happens because there’s so many towns, so many municipalities, and so much friction in sharing. And so I see a lot of the value of what we do is not just providing great technology, but great experience, so that there is sort of a template that a city can at least understand.
And then, fundamentally, again, we understand that every city is different. There are different conditions, there are different policy goals, they’re at a different place in their adoption curve for things like curb management technologies. So it’s obviously very important to meet cities where they are.
One of the reasons we did the Curb Challenge last year, and again this year — so we’re actually now in the middle of evaluating applications for year two of the Digital Curb Challenge — was to essentially figure out which cities are ready to put their hand up and are ready to do this. And we actually create what’s called the Digital Curb Challenge Cohort — and we have a Slack group, a Slack channel, et cetera — where the cities that we’re working with can share their learnings and best practices amongst themselves as well. And that was very successful in year one and we’re doing it again in year two.
And so even the cities where there’s not actually a pilot, right? So I think we had 18 odd cities total last year, in addition to the four announced pilots — or, sorry, including the four announced pilots that were part of that group. So we see ourselves as really providing, channeling the energy in a productive way. But then also understanding the key user base here, which is fleets, and working with them in cities as well.
And helping cities to basically build relationships with fleets. Because historically, the relationship has basically been paying tickets, right? And we see this as our mission, is to provide a better curb service, right? We think everybody can win here. When there’s a better curb service, that helps economic development, which everybody ultimately wants, I believe, for a city. And also we think that there’s a happy coincidence that actually that can also lead to reduction in congestion.
And by the way, it can also lead to some additional revenue being generated that can be reinvested into transportation in the city. Now, to be clear, in the short run, it’s not going to pay for the transit budget for the city, but every little bit helps. And you see this with, I think they’re called parking benefit districts, is the term. So where certain areas of cities have neighborhoods, they’ve set up these districts where the money that’s collected from parking, just traditional parking, is reinvested into improving bus stops, and bike lanes, and things like that in the area. So we see the same potential here, where it’s not a zero-sum game.
We actually believe this can be a win-win for business in the city, for the individuals who use the city, be they residents or visitors, as well as of course the city itself, the agency, and set of agencies, the government, to make their lives better and enable them to actually more effectively implement their policies.
Vanessa: I’m curious, in the wake of the pandemic, how are cities thinking about their streets perhaps in a different way? And how do you see the future of city streets in the wake of the pandemic as well?
Sure. Well, I live in New York and you only have to walk outside to see how curb space has changed, and I think this is true of many residents of many cities, not just in the U.S. but around the world. And so the way I think about it is that the pandemic has essentially redefined how we look at street space — not just curb space — and with a fresh set of eyes. We obviously have new constraints.
Last summer, when we first started doing curbside dining, I was sitting in a parking spot, eating dinner with my family. The amount of money that we were paying for dinner, per unit time, take the tax revenues to the city, et cetera — I unfortunately can do the math, or fortunately — and it’s a lot more than the amount of money the city was generating from parking, quite simply, from that unit of time in that space.
So, it’s sort of more and more people sort of doing this kind of equation, if you will, or this math, is I think broadly healthy. It challenges the old way of doing things, recognizes that curb space is more than just for parking cars.
And I like to say to people that parking is actually version one of congestion pricing, if you think about it. If you price the space that you’re driving to — whether it’s on or off street — appropriately, you effectively have created the same set of incentives as a congestion pricing scheme. And so, it’s sort of backdoor congestion pricing, and every city today has this tool at their disposal.
Now, obviously there’s a lot of political interests and so forth. But again, back to your pandemic question, I think the pandemic has disrupted, for want of a better term, that kind of line of thinking, and we’re being forced as a society, as residents, as members of city governments, et cetera, to rethink those assumptions.
And so, I’m very optimistic about the future as it relates to change at the street level. Clearly, we’re betting our company on it. We think it’s exciting. We want to be a part of that change, that impact.
Eric: When you think about the future of streets in kind of a way that feels ideal to you, or maybe what is possible to achieve with city streets, what do you see? What does that street look like to you?
Yeah, I get this question a lot and I used to answer it with sort of like, “There’ll be XYZ technology doing this, that, or the other,” like physically, what will I see? But now I sort of am reminded of if you go to the Air and Space Museum in the Dulles area, it’s next to Dulles Airport, and you can actually, there’s a cool exhibit — cool for people like me — where you can go and actually go up to the tower and listen to air traffic control. And you can see the planes stacking up and et cetera. So all of this is a long way of saying that I actually now think more about the feeling I will have when I look at that street of the future, regardless of the specific components and technologies and so forth, which tends to be the answer to this question.
And the feeling is one more of orchestration, coordination — hence our name — and the same as a boy witnessing that kind of orchestration of an airport. And it wouldn’t be efficient obviously to have an air traffic control tower at every block face in every city with humans in it. But imagine if you could.
And that’s I think what technology can enable. So that’s why I think getting into the specifics of which technology is sort of less productive or interesting a conversation. To me it’s more about the feeling you would get as a young boy. Imagining myself walking down that street and be like, “How is this all sort of working?” And so that’s the kind of the feeling that I hope, that I can see in my lifetime, on every single street in every single city in every part of the world.
Eric: Thank you, Stephen Smyth.
Vanessa: Thank you so much.
Absolutely. Thank you, Vanessa. Thank you, Eric. Take care.
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