City administration has created the Office of Curb Management within the New York City Department of Transportation, according to a statement.
The general idea: to bring “greater order and ease to New York City streets,” according to the statement.
The city has 6,300 miles of streets and about 3 million curbside parking spaces. But it’s not only parking that can stress curbside spaces — so can deliveries, bikes, outdoor dining, waste collection and other tasks.
The new office will oversee curb policies for the five boroughs — policies that in some cases haven’t changed much since the 1950s, according to city officials.
“This new office will centralize planning so that our curbs can keep up with the new and growing ways New Yorkers enjoy our city,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani said in the statement. “By modernizing curb management, we're delivering a streetscape that is the envy of the world.”
The office will help to update polices to better reflect 21st-century big-city life. That means more attention to such factors as “multimodal transportation options, loading zones, microhubs, vehicle pick-up and drop-off zones, secure bike parking, outdoor dining, and more,” according to the statement.
The new office also will bring together planning and other work that is now spread among various city teams.
Some of the early goals of the new office are figuring out how to increase “vehicle turnover at the curb, allow roadway outdoor dining and pilot on-street waste containerization,” according to the statement.
The city plans to name office leadership in the coming days. City officials did not immediately offer more details about the office or what technology it might use to achieve its goals.
The new office starts work as questions about how to achieve digital curb management become more prominent.
A city spokesperson said the new office will consider technology that could improve curb management.
“This unit will be taking a comprehensive approach to curbside management, a component of which will be looking at best practices and existing and emerging technologies across the globe that could be helpful in supporting more efficient use of the curb space,” Vincent Barone, press secretary for the city’s DOT, told Government Technology via email. “NYC DOT has worked in recent years to expand the use of app-based and paperless parking.”
