Coord expands across North America
Coord expands across North America
The company doubles its curb coverage as more cities embrace digital curb management with the goal of supporting over 100 cities across the globe by 2022.
Ride-hail, online shopping deliveries, food delivery services, e-bikes, e-scooters, the pending advent of autonomous vehicles — you name it — we are experiencing an influx of innovative mobility options where our streets are continuously filled with new ways for people and goods to move around our cities. With more innovation, however, comes more demand for curb space both in scope and scale. Companies like Lyft, Bird and Amazon, have all changed the way we use our curbs, no longer making it just a place to leave our car as we run errands. Instead, the curb has become a prime piece of real estate for residents, businesses and public services alike.
Yet, as the demand for curb space increases, so too does the need to digitize the curb to ensure that city streets are more productive starting with the curb.
With more vehicles vying to enter the transportation ecosystem, we’re seeing crowding streets, increased traffic, more vehicle emissions and longer commutes. By embracing the digital curb, cities can help reduce congestion and improve land use on the street level with better informed policy changes, regulation, and compliance along the curb. By leveraging curb data and supporting new mobility options into existing transit systems, cities can identify new avenues for revenue as transportation methods evolve―such as variable pricing, scooter or bike parking, or even minute-by-minute parking for ride-hail or loading zones.
The digital curb provides the opportunity to improve constituent satisfaction by creating curbsides that are more predictable for users, dynamic in their functions, and more productive by serving more people. With the support of our engineering firm partners and municipalities, Coord is happy to announce that we have added five new cities to our platform, made available through the Coord API and Coord Toolkit: Austin, Miami, Philadelphia, San Diego and Washington DC.
Welcome to the Curb Life
Until recently, most city planners and officials have only had classic surveying wheels, manual labor and dated binders full of miles of curb information to help inform their planning. While less costly than traditional surveys, GPS and vehicle-based camera systems couldn’t capture the level of detail required to accurately create the digital curb. We changed the game by finding a balance between speed and accuracy with our Surveyor app, which is included in the Coord Toolkit, designed for cities to innovate their curb management. By leveraging augmented reality, Coord users can quickly and easily collect assets along the curb to produce a detailed and accurate map of the underlying curb rules and regulations.
The initial cities included in the Coord API were San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Seattle. Now, we are quickly expanding across North America by adding five new major cities to our API―tracking to our goal of supporting over 100 cities across the globe by 2022.
Here’s a deeper look:
In Austin, we partnered early on with engineering firm Kimley-Horn to survey Downtown Austin, the Seaholm District, Rainey Street, parts of East Cesar Chavez and Holly. There are 79 curb miles in the Coord API, but field collectors walked a total of 214 curb miles to make that happen (all surveys are double coverage for data accuracy) and collected 10,000+ assets along the way . Read more about the survey experience in Kenny’s Curb Diaries highlighting the uniqueness that Austin brings.
In Miami & Miami Beach, Kimley-Horn rose to the occasion for our biggest survey of the lot, a total of 161 curb miles! They covered the areas of Wynwood, Brickell, Downtown Miami, South Beach, Lummus, Flamingo, and Miami Beach’s City Center. The field collectors managed to capture over 14,000 assets across the colorful streets of Miami.
In Philadelphia, field collectors from AECOM walked the streets of Center City, Rittenhouse Square, South Street, Logan Square and University City to capture over 100 miles of curb in 7 days. This team of five collectors walked 245 curb miles (again, double coverage for data accuracy) to capture over 17,000 curb assets in the home of the Liberty Bell.
In San Diego, Coord was selected by the City of San Diego through a competitive process to participate in the 2019 Startup in Residence (STIR) program. We collaborated with Kimley-Horn to capture nearly 90 miles of curbs and approximately 19,000 curb assets across Cortez Hill, Downtown San Diego, East Village, Gaslamp, Little Italy and the Marina. Not to mention, the team of four field collectors did this in just seven days.
In Washington D.C, we worked with Walker Consultants to capture the data in tourist-heavy spots like the National Mall and Dupont Circle. We also captured data for Downtown D.C., Logan Circle, the Navy Yard, Penn Quarter, U Street and The Wharf. The team of field collectors walked over 270 miles across these neighborhoods, surveying 96 miles of curb and capturing approximately 20,000 curb assets.
Over the course of a few weeks, Coord and our partners managed to cover a lot of ground: over 500 miles of curbs and 80K curb assets were surveyed across Austin, Miami, Philadelphia, San Diego and Washington D.C. If you’d like to see the results of these surveys visualized, you can explore the data in Curb Explorer on our website.
Today, all of this information is accessible to Coord subscribers through the Coord Toolkit or the Coord API. Our partners, who managed the respective data collections, have released a subset of asset data for each of the cities into Open Curbs for non-commercial use by researchers, local agencies, mobility companies or anyone else in the community.
The areas include:
- Austin: East 6th Street entertainment district
- Miami: Wynwood
- Philadelphia: Rittenhouse Square
- San Diego: Little Italy
- Washington D.C.: U Street Corridor
Want to be next? Bring the digital curb to your city
We’re on a mission to make cities more livable for everyone by making streets more productive, starting with the curb. If you are a city agency or transportation provider and want to bring the digital curb to your city or just let us know what you think, drop us a line at partners@coord.co to ‘get ahead of the curb’.