Kerb Enthusiasm: Lessons from Harvard on Managing City Movement
Joey Grigg
Year
2024
Role
R&D Team
Joey Grigg
Date
07.2025
Category
Perspectives
Category
Perspectives
Date
07.2025
A recent article from Harvard’s ‘Data-Smart City Solutions’ practice highlights a critical message for urban leaders everywhere: Truly effective city transport management demands more than new technology or data dashboards alone - it needs thoughtful policy, local engagement, and collaborative experimentation. This is acutely relevant at kerb - the seam between the public and commercial sectors.
At Osta, we see this as a timely provocation. The kerb (or curb, depending on your side of the Atlantic) is fast becoming one of the most contested spaces in our cities - yet also one of the easiest levers to pull for meaningful change. As vehicles grow, deliveries multiply, and streets aspire to be more liveable, a new approach is essential.
Selecting two key takeouts from the article, focused on private car use and logistics demands respectively, we consider how one might challenge cities and councils to become more space, cost and time efficient in increasingly dense urban areas.
Dynamic Pricing
One of the clearest threads in the Harvard piece is the role of dynamic pricing and differentiated regulation. Simply put, cities cannot continue treating all vehicles - regardless of size, weight or social impact - as equal users of limited kerb space.
The article highlights that “improperly pricing [the access to kerb parking] provides the wrong incentives while forcing maintenance costs onto taxpayers, unfairly making them pay for goods they do not use”. In a smart city “pricing no longer needs to be static. It can rise and fall at different times of the day or in neighbourhoods where demand swings up and down”. The given example of this is the way in which “Minneapolis Mobility and Curbside Access Manager Dillon Fried uses data to lower rates in underutilized areas or to raise rates near stadiums and arenas during major sporting events”.
Thought starter:
All cities could, for reasonable setup fees and with cost-efficient iterative rollouts, begin experimenting with kerbside policies that actively differentiate by vehicle type and context. We propose that cities ask themselves whether they would want to consider ides such as the following…
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Pricing permits and parking fees higher for heavier or oversized vehicles.
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Creating “light vehicle zones” in sensitive or high-footfall areas.
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Using policy to guide behavioural change, supported by clear incentives for smaller vehicles, e-cargo bikes, or walking.
These policies can be hyper-local. A dense street in Bristol or Oxford may need very different kerb rules than a regional town. This requires cities to plan intentionally - with residents groups, logistics operators, city, urban and transport planners at the table with design teams to shape realistic schemes.
Delivery Management
The Harvard article also stresses how kerb space is being overwhelmed by last-mile deliveries, with everything from restaurant orders to online returns funnelling into ad hoc stops.
It’s noted that “circling drivers looking for a parking space represent a third of urban traffic”, however with “proper pricing and allocation of curb space organized by demand, delivery trucks aren’t forced to double park; drop-offs of people, bikes and scooters occur in planned areas; and local leaders have new funds available to support transit”.
The last mile is messy, inconsistent, and unique from block to block. Yet there’s also an opportunity here: coordinated micro-consolidation, rightsized vehicles, and tech-enabled booking systems can produce genuine social and economic wins.
Thought starter:
Rather than building expensive new infrastructure, cities and private operators can pilot local delivery hubs which shift final deliveries to smaller, low-impact modes - e.g. e-cargo bikes or hand trolleys. Paired with simple tech (like booking platforms or dynamic curb permits), this can better sequence deliveries, reduce circling, and minimise street disruption. A smart pilot could involve:
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Dedicated morning delivery slots for larger vehicles.
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Offloading to cargo bikes at a micro-hub for residential streets.
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Dynamic kerb sensors linked to booking systems that guide drivers to legal, time-limited spaces.
This is not only about efficiency; it actively reduces congestion and emissions while improving safety and street life.
At Osta, we’re working on these very challenges across a range of projects - from designing right-sized last mile vehicles to helping rethink how streets allocate space. If you’re a city official, a developer, a logistics provider, or simply someone who cares about how we can make our streets work better for everyone, we’d love to talk.
Get in touch at hello@ostastudios.com. Let’s explore how to shape the future of our streets.