Chicago’s curb side management to get better with data analytics

To collect data related to curb activity, “The City Tech Collaborative” in Chicago has announced a project that would be running a month-long. The move is part of the city’s efforts to manage curbs more efficiently. Phase I of the Project involves the development of an analytics tool that is scalable, practical, and usable to better understand the curb.

Curbs are often overlooked even though they are an integral part of the city’s transport systems. Today, their usage has changed to rideshares, same-day delivery vehicles, and dockless vehicles, while earlier the curb was primarily used by buses, taxis, bike lanes, and freight. It has also emerged as one of the hottest new real estate markets. Bosch and HERE technologies have been brought onboard as private sector partners to help with their expertise for the project. Traffic movement, congestion, and other data points to identify “areas of friction” and bottlenecks, will be provided and analyzed by HERE technologies. This still is a part of Phase I of the project, which largely involves digital mapping of the curb.  Phase II will be about the solutions and the approaches.  

Though there is a lot of discussion taking place on curb access, no real simple answers have been found and implemented until now. The City Tech Collaborative, which aims to use technology to solve public problems, is a consortium of private sector companies.