Leuven: Reimagining the curbside

From Hernán Mejía

3 minutes reading time

Locations:

Leuven (Belgium)

Challenge area:

Sustainable City Logistics

Implementation period:

Started

Supported by: EIT Urban Mobility

The Challenge

Cities curbs, being the interface between roads and sidewalks, are more contested than ever due to the growth of urban logistics, active mobility, and new mobility.

Despite the growing relevance of curb space in cities, public administrations often lack the capacity to respond to these competing needs, and struggle to identify how to best regulate their curbs to improve logistics, mobility, and congestion. Factors contributing to this situation includes:

  • Fragmented or inexistent understanding of curb assets and regulations
  • Missing global picture of who and when is the curb most and least used
  • Cities have limited resources to analyze and disseminate knowledge of the curbs and their regulations
  • Unable to identify gaps or inconsistencies in curb allocation
  • Unable to effectively communicate regulations for specific use cases

 

The Solution

FlexCurb Planning; is a web-based platform for city managers and officials that offers a consolidated and accessible inventory of the curb zones and their regulations. The platform reveals patterns of curb allocation for different users, with a special focus on Loading zones, bike and handicap spaces, and general parking. Using the platform, city decision makers better understand the gaps and inconsistencies of the current supply of parking spaces and the effectiveness of dynamic uses of the curb. The insights provided by the platform inform city managers on where and how to make interventions to better allocate the needs of curb users.

The FlexCurb Planning platform’s features include:

  • Map visualizations of curb assets, which reveal in detail the features and regulations of each curb zone and space. Advanced visualizations also reveal the coverage, distribution, and density of each type of curb space, revealing areas of under- and over-supply of each type of curb and parking space.
  • Advanced map filtering, to tailor your analysis to specific zones of interest and combinations of curb types.
  • Analytics dashboard, provides intuitive key metrics on the curb allocation and its regulations that enrich the analysis of the curb supply.
  • Comparison tool, which expands the capabilities of the analytics dashboard, allows comparison between different areas within the city, or even with other cities.
  • Expansion plugins, which help enrich analysis by through custom data layers.