Collaborative Research: Activity-Based Modeling and Optimization for Urban Curb Management

Curb space, the interface between roadways and sidewalks, is one of the most constrained and heavily utilized resources in urban transportation systems. It supports passenger pick-up and drop-off, parking, freight loading, and emerging delivery services. Current curb management practices often fail to account for the complex interactions among different users and the broader impacts on mobility, congestion, safety, and economic activity. As curb demand continues to grow, there is an increasing need for data-driven approaches that connect curb use with the underlying activities that generate transportation demand. This award supports research to develop new methods for managing urban curb space by integrating models of curb user behavior, transportation system performance, and the social costs associated with different curb management strategies. The resulting framework will support the design and evaluation of more effective curb management policies. Project activities include collaboration with local governments, which own and manage most curb space, as well as freight, delivery, and other mobility stakeholders to help ensure the practical relevance of the research. The research develops an integrated framework that combines activity-based behavioral models, traffic flow models, economic analysis, simulation, and optimization to evaluate alternative curb management strategies. The first research thrust develops data-driven methods to characterize curb-user behavior, quantify the social costs of inefficient curb utilization, and evaluate how pricing, allocation, and operational policies influence transportation system performance. This work integrates user-specific behavioral models with link- and network-level traffic flow models to capture the interactions between curb demand, congestion, and system-wide externalities. The second thrust develops scalable simulation and optimization capabilities to evaluate candidate curb management policies across multiple operational scenarios, from individual street segments to interconnected urban neighborhoods. A central scientific contribution of the project is the explicit linkage of curb demand to the underlying urban activities that generate transportation demand, such as commuting, education, healthcare, shopping, recreation, and goods movement. This integrated framework will provide new insights into how activity patterns shape curb demand and how curb management policies influence urban mobility and infrastructure performance. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.