FlexCurb

Cities need to make transport more reliable and sustainable. For example, double parking caused by delivery vehicles is one of the main negative impacts of the upturn in last-mile deliveries, generating conflicts with pedestrians, cyclists, public transport and emergency vehicles. Innovative measures are needed to help cities reduce congestion and trips; achieve sustainable mobility goals; improve delivery efficiency; anticipate new technologies; and, potentially increase revenue. In the new concept of Shared-Use Mixed Zones (SUM Zones), parking management, urban vehicle access regulation and freight management are integrated and combined with flexible curbside management concepts.

Following this vision, FlexCURB focuses on improving urban logistics by enabling sectoral collaboration and tailors tools to improving the way city logistics are currently understood, coordinated, and regulated. The project partners will deliver innovations, in the form of two marketable products:

1. The FlexCURB Planning platform
2. The FlexCURB Driver App

With the FlexCURB Planning Platform as the interface, the public sector partners will be able to:

• implement dynamic traffic regulations to meet the demands of an ever-changing network. Underutilised spaces would be freed up for freight to mitigate congestion;
• pilot a suite of technologies to monitor the live and historical usage of parking assets;
• connect logistics APIs, share curbside and traffic restrictions, reduce network disruption and solve conflicts with vulnerable road user.

The FlexCURB Driver App, will provide freight partners with:

• up-to-date information about parking rules and curb regulations;
• access to delivery locations by planning freight movements based on location of loading areas;
• curb reporting and insights.

Project impact and results

More than 170k data points were collected, included 102,934 parking sensor events, 24,596 curbside spaces, of which 574 were loading zones; 24 individual parking regulations, 44,076 parking events inferred from Floating Car Data trips, and 37 individual parking check-in events from the app.

FlexCurb successfully engaged four external stakeholders, logistics companies Heppner and France Boissons act as tester of the FlexCurb DriverAPP, while the mobility department and the local town planning agency (ADEUS) acted as tester of the FlexCurb Platform. Finally, the department managing urban traffic (SIRAC) of the city acted as observer and advisor.

FlexCurb contributes to better understanding citizens’ behaviour on the new purple parking spaces (private cars) focused on short-term parking.