An influential observer of urban life, Jane Jacobs argued that sidewalks play an essential role in cities as places for social interaction, allowing diverse residents to mix around varying activities safely. City planners have ignored this famous observation for decades. They began segregating city uses—office here, residential there, industrial somewhere else. Yet cities are dynamic. Combining new technology and service models puts new pressure on sidewalks and curb space. These included the proliferation of deliveries, changes in parking technology, digital kiosks, and the growth of ride-sharing, bike and scooter sharing, and outdoor cafes. In addition, traditional uses such as lighting, signage, and planting still needed space. The variety and intensity of uses changed sidewalks into in-demand real estate.
These shifts came quickly, and cities were not well-equipped to deal with them. Procedures left over from an earlier age didn’t recognize the scale of change or the need to regulate and manage with much more fluidity. Few areas generate as many complaints as parking. When I proposed wholesale changes in parking placement and rates, the pushback was furious from motorists, retailers, office and apartment owners, and the City Council. To inject some data and reframe the issue, I asked a few city workers to count, daily, how long cars occupied the same spots (turnover was valued) and to count out-of-city license plates. Their survey showed that over half of the motorists subsidized with the below-market rates did not live in the city. The results helped us convince retailers that underpriced parking with no duration limits incented too many all-day parkers who prevented easy access for customers.
Today, several cities are trying to innovate around how they handle the changing demands on their sidewalks and curbs. To accelerate solutions driven by new technologies, the USDOT launched its Strengthening Mobility and Revolutionizing Transportation (SMART) grant program to spark change in the face of established policies and changing demand. Over 30 cities received funding to show how smart traffic signals and grids, sensor-based infrastructure, delivery logistics, and integration could improve communities. This paper draws on the challenges faced by SMART grant recipients, a group of whom my team and I have been working with as part of a collaboration managed by the Open Mobility Foundation (OMF), a nonprofit group dedicated to easing the path to change through collaboration and common technology standards.
The initiative has sparked new thinking in cities but also faces implementation challenges. For city governments, the curb today is a complex place where multiple departments share jurisdiction amid competing needs of residents, businesses, and many other stakeholders. The curb is more than a concrete slab. It’s a critical test of a city’s ability to execute change management. As Art Pearce, Deputy Director of Planning, Projects, and Programs for the Portland Bureau of Transportation, noted in an insightful presentation at DOT in 2024, “the process of guiding change to fruition—and helping people transition to the new—faces a range of external and internal challenges and confronts bureaucratic obstacles and cultural challenges.”
While the SMART funding gave cities financial freedom to experiment, rallying support for transformative approaches faced several hurdles. Some of the most critical early work undertaken by the cities was limited to internal issues like data maintenance, internal coordination, and technical protocols. The federal funding comes in conditional stages, starting with planning before implementation, which can make building momentum difficult. Gaining buy-in from city employees is challenging. And even with grant funding coming in, broad change often pressures existing budgets, as adopting new infrastructure requires investments in technology and training that may not be readily available.
This paper presents six components of successful change management that can help cities advance their goals at the curb, regardless of whether they received grant funds. Coupled with the leadership and vision of program managers and senior city officials, following these principles can help cities produce safer and better-utilized curbs and sidewalks that meet the competing needs of today’s users.
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