The idea of smart cities, driverless cars, and artificial intelligence is propelling us into the unknown. But there are some things we can predict. Everyday things will be seen in a new light. The kerbside for example. Other than kerb ramps most of us don’t think about the kerbside and mobility. But somebody else has.
The Future of Place webpage has a link to a report that looks at the Future Ready Kerbside. The publication by Uber and WSP explores what the future might hold in the context of shared mobility and liveable cities.
The kerb is the intersection between the pedestrian area and the road. How space is allocated each side of the kerb dictates who can access these spaces. The kerbside is not passive infrastructure so we need to prepare for its future use. It needs careful management by city leaders.
There are ten recommendations in the Executive Summary of the report and they include:
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- Co-design the vision for places in partnership with the community, businesses and governments.
- Move from general parking to pick-up/drop-off for people and goods to improve kerbside productivity and access to local places.
- Take a people-and-place first approach so that new mobility is an enabler and not a detractor to realising the co-designed vision.
- Street design guidelines must get ahead of new mobility and proactively focus on the best possible outcomes for people and places.
- Prioritise walking to access local places, along with transit and
micro-mobility, supported by funding for local infrastructure.
The full report is titled, Place and Mobility: Future Ready Kerbside and has more technical detail. Both the full report and the executive summary have interesting infographics and images depicting how the future might look.