The humble curb is getting a lot of attention these days. Startups are scrambling to disrupt the post-pandemic parking sector, arguing that real-time data will mean less traffic and more revenue for cities.
Over the last decade, the street ballet of cars, trucks and delivery vans has gained new players like ride-hailing vehicles and rented bikes and e-scooters. Add in a pandemic that turbocharged the instant-delivery ecosystem, turned parking spaces into dining rooms, and upended long-held commuting patterns, and the space beside the sidewalk has become increasingly coveted real estate. To impose order on — and extract revenue from — the crowded urban curbside, a host of private companies are jostling for market position.
Privatizing curb space is nothing new: Cities have long outsourced management of street parking to legacy companies like Xerox Corp.’s Affiliated Computer Services, which ran the electronic toll collection system E-ZPass, among other services. But now a new breed of curb-savvy startups is disrupting the estimated $20 billion US parking industry by wooing city officials with something they haven’t had before: real-time data on how their curb space is being used.
“What I think most cities currently find today is that their delivery activities — whether it’s on-demand food delivery or packages — those large operators don’t actually pay for parking,” said Regina Clewlow, co-founder and chief executive officer of data transportation company Populus.
That means cities are potentially leaving millions of dollars in parking revenue on the table, said Clewlow, who helped launch Populus in 2017. The company’s Mobility Manager and Curb Manager platforms use GPS data from more than 40 different mobility operators, such as ride-hailing companies, to give cities access to real-time parking data about bikes, scooters and cars. With that, the software maps a city’s street grid to visualize how curb space could be better utilized. For example, a high amount of bike and scooter activity on a certain block might suggest a need for a designated lane or corral. Cities are also able to charge fleet vehicles for access to the space that they use.
Populus just raised $11 million led by investors Zero Infinity Partners and Robert Downey Jr.’s FootPrint Coalition Ventures, bringing the San Francisco-based startup’s total funding to nearly $20 million. “Regina and the Populus team are replacing parking meters and parking tickets with data infrastructure that cities will use to lower the environmental footprint of life in the 21st century,” said Jonathan Schulhof, the fund’s managing partner, in a statement to Bloomberg CityLab.
Cities pay a subscription fee to use the platform, and Populus takes a slice of the net revenue they gain by using it. Populus works with more than 100 cities across the US and Israel, including Seattle, Chicago and Baltimore, and is eyeing an expansion in Europe.
Another company, the Los Angeles-based startup Automotus, relies on battery-powered cameras mounted on streetlight poles to collect data on curb parking activity. The cameras snap 30 images every second — Automotus blurs faces to ensure privacy — and then the software aggregates its insights into a computer dashboard that cities can view to set policy. For example, if a stretch of road attracts an unusual number of parked cars at certain times of the day, that might indicate a need to bump up rates.