Effective Management of the Curb Space Allocation in Urban Transportation System

Abstract

Curb space management and traffic flow are two essential elements of the transportation system that interact with each other and affect the overall system performance. With the growth of new mobility operators and goods delivery, the demand for access to the curb space is increasing rapidly. Thus, the traditional use of curb space for parking only is challenged, and it becomes essential to manage the curb space effectively. Our study investigates the allocation of curb space for various uses (i.e., parking, pick-up/drop-off, and loading/unloading) so that the overall transportation system performance can be enhanced. We simulate the transportation system and analyze the interactions between traffic flow and curb space usage by investigating the impact of the allocated curb spaces for different uses on traffic congestion. We build an optimization model to determine dynamic curb space allocation decisions that ensure smooth traffic flow. Our objective is to maximize the cities’ profit of curb space allocation decisions and minimizing the traffic delay. We further evaluate the value of dynamic curb space allocation policies over the fixed allocation policies and find that the dynamic policy can result in improvements in traffic delay