Management of the curb space allocation in urban transportation system

Abstract

Curb space management and traffic flow are two important 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 curb space is increasing rapidly. Thus, the traditional use of curb space solely for parking is challenged and it becomes important to manage curb space effectively. Our study investigates the allocation of curb space for various uses (i.e., parking, pickup/drop‐off, and loading/unloading) so that 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 on traffic congestion of the allocation of curb spaces for different uses. We build an optimization model to determine dynamic curb space allocation decisions that ensure a smooth traffic flow. Our objective is to maximize the cities’ profit from curb space allocation decisions and minimization of traffic delay. We further evaluate the value of dynamic curb space allocation policies over fixed‐allocation policies and find that the dynamic policies can result in improvements in traffic delay and total distance driven.