About the Smart Cities Collaborative

In 2017, Transportation for America (T4A) launched the Smart Cities Collaborative to build a forum for collaboration and provide direct technical assistance to a number of leading-edge cities advancing smart mobility policies and projects. We’ve now twice convened networks of agencies and cities to enable participants to learn from their peers and test concepts, understand market potential, assess regulatory and political hurdles, address environmental and equity issues and refine their approach to implementing smart mobility concepts.

What we’ve learned from the last two Collaboratives is that in order to benefit from new mobility technologies, cities want to understand how to leverage a critical but often-ignored asset: the curb.

Why curbs?

Curbs are where transportation and land use meet. Local governments realize that the curb is the most valuable asset they own, but many cities haven’t used it to its greatest potential.

The demands on curb space are increasing, with long-standing demands like parking, trash pickup and water management coming to a head with bikeshare, scooters, pedestrians, cafe seating and parklets. Yet while demands increase, the tools on how to share a limited resource have not. We’ve heard repeatedly from cities that they need more information and experience with curb management.

Experience is essential to understanding how to best manage curb space. Which is why as we reboot the third year of the Collaborative, we’re doing things a little bit differently: we’re dividing participants into “pilot cities” and “peer cities.”

Why pilots?

We’re past theorizing. We spent the last few years thinking about how technology can improve transportation and quality of life—now it’s time to put it into action.

We need to find out what actually improves people’s lives, as well as identify the various challenges to providing multiple uses of curb space in a way that supports broader regional goals, makes the transportation system operate more efficiently, and serves the community more equitably.

In Year Three, the Collaborative will run from January 2020 to the fall of 2020. We will meet three times total (Jan/Feb, April/May, Aug/Sept). The locations of the meetings will be determined based on the pilot cities, as we will hold a meeting in each of the pilot cities. The first meeting will only be the pilot cities. The remaining two will involve the pilot and peer cities, with the pilot cities arriving ahead of time.

We will also have remote meetings and webinars in between the in-person meetings. By September, we would like to have all three pilots up and running. We would then spend the next couple of months working with the cities to evaluate the pilots. This could be moved up if the cities pilots are up sooner. At the end of the year, we will publish a report sharing the best practices from the pilots.