U.S. cities are witnessing an era of transformative innovations in electric vehicles (EVs), autonomous vehicles, on-vehicle electronics, Global Position System, mobile devices, digital maps, and numerous apps that assist driving and parking. However, the advance in curb environments where vehicles operate has not kept pace. Curb environments serve as a unique nexus that connects on-road traffic and pedestrian sidewalks across urban communities, but are burdened in urban cores due to space competition for pick-ups and drop-offs, freight loading, EVs charging, bicycle, and scooter parking. This NSF Smart & Connected Community planning grant studies curbside environments at the downtown and University of Florida (UF) campus communities in the City of Gainesville, Florida. It focuses on how to integrate vehicles, people, mobile devices, physical and cyber infrastructures to coordinate curb space uses. Collectively, these innovations will maximize equitable and convenient access while minimizing greenhouse gas emissions for healthy and sustainable communities, relieving congestion at curb spaces, and boosting livability for community residents. The project explores important, emerging challenges faced by cities across America. The knowledge learned will be shared with local communities, who will benefit in the long term, to prepare city curbs for future burgeoning technology and mobility innovations.

The project seeks to understand curb space uses of urban communities and to develop strategic management to adapt increasingly diverse and conflicting curb space uses in response to emerging vehicular technologies and mobility innovations. Several key interdisciplinary research questions are addressed, including (i) how sensor data from curb environments, vehicles, and human mobile devices can be collected, curated, and correlated jointly by separate transportation and parking management entities? (ii) how to design, plan, and manage curb environments to address congestion, safety, and accessibility issues collectively across cyberinfrastructure in the urban communities? (iii) how to precisely predict the evolvement of curb uses across time and space in the future? (iv) how to creatively coordinate various curb uses in real time? (v) what are the potential privacy issues to vehicles and people at curb environments when surveillance, sensing, and data analyses are performed, and how to design innovative technologies to mitigate privacy threats? The project team will form novel research problems from socio-technical perspectives in the context of campus-downtown settings, develop academic and community partnerships with the necessary knowledge to address the problems, and prepare testbed 'Smart Curb' environments to be included in a future SCC-IRG proposal.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.