How Curbs Became the New Urban Battleground

It's common knowledge that city curbs are fiercely contested places, what with Ubers and Lyfts hovering inconveniently and blocking traffic; piles of shared bikes and scooters being dropped off and picked up; rapidly climbing numbers of deliveries being made by double-parked trucks; and buses and taxis pulling up—not to mention all the private-car parking going on. These daily dramas will only get more boisterous and difficult in the years to come, when fleets of city-licensed driverless cars join the fray. Like any complex policy regime aimed at changing the status quo, these plans require very detailed data to support them.

For a precedent that has caused a lot of policy misery for this country, consider high speed internet. Private companies selling us internet services have relied heavily on access to public rights-of-way for places to string their wires and install equipment, and for years have claimed that granular data about the locations they actually serve—households and businesses—is too confidential to provide to regulators. And price data—forget it. Without this information, the Federal Communications Commission makes policy in the dark, routinely overestimating the availability and speed of competitive connections, and having little insight into how much Americans are actually paying. Result: blindness on the government side, and a stagnant, oligopolistic marketplace on the consumer side. The risk of relying on third parties for data about shared mobility companies’ use of curbs is that policymakers will be stuck with whatever that third party chooses to make available, at whatever level of generality is deemed suitable by a group of private companies. Cities should demand granular location and pricing data (as well as data logging payments to drivers) as a condition of allowing access by shared mobility services—human-driven or driverless, tiny or huge—to their rights-of-way, including streets, curbs, and sidewalks. 

[Susan Crawford is a professor at Harvard Law School]