View the November 18, 2020 seminar recording
Jennifer Symoun
Good afternoon or good morning to those of you to the West. Welcome to the Talking Freight Seminar Series. My name is Jennifer Symoun and I will moderate today's seminar. Today's topic is Curbside Management and Freight Deliveries.
Before I go any further, I do want to remind you to call into the teleconference for the best audio quality. If you are listening to the audio over the computer and experience any issues, I am unable to fix them as audio quality will vary based on your network connection, computer, speakers, and other factors. Please also keep in mind if you are calling into the teleconference for the audio, you will need to mute your computer speakers or else you will be hearing your audio over the computer as well.
Today's seminar will last 90 minutes, with 60 minutes allocated for the speakers, and the final 30 minutes for audience Question and Answer. If during the presentations you think of a question, you can type it into the chat area. Please make sure you send your question to "Everyone" and indicate which presenter your question is for. Presenters will be unable to answer your questions during their presentations, but I will start off the question and answer session with the questions typed into the chat box. We will also take questions over the phone if time allows and I will provide instructions on how to do so once we get to that point.
The PowerPoint presentations used during the seminar are available for download from the file download box in the lower right corner of your screen. The presentations will also be available online within the next few weeks, along with a recording and a transcript. I will send a link to the recording in the next day or so and will also notify all attendees once all materials are posted online.
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Today we'll have three presenters:
Our first presentation will be given by Soumya Dey, an Associate Director with the DC Department of Transportation. In his present role, Soumya is responsible for the safety and operation of the transportation system in our nation's capital that is utilized by 1.25 million users every day. He leads a staff of over 500 and an annual budget of $100 million in the areas of intelligent transportation system, safety engineering, incident management and response and automated enforcement. Soumya has over twenty-five years of experience in the transportation profession, spanning the public and private sectors.
Soumya Dey
Thank you, Jennifer. Good afternoon, or good morning, depending on what time zone you are in. Thank you, Chip, for the opportunity to share Washington, D.C.'s experience with a larger audience. So, before I begin, I want to do a couple of acknowledgments. First of all, this presentation is primarily based on a pilot project that we did in the Penn Quarter/Chinatown area of Washington, D.C. The pilot was funded through a Federal Highway Value Pricing Grant. The second point I wanted to make is that this is based on a TRB paper that we authored. It was published in TRR, and you have the publication number there. I wanted to acknowledge my co-authors. We had Benito Perez and Stephanie Dock from DDOT; Laura Richards who, when we did the study, was actually at DDOT, but is with Cambridge Systematics now; Alec Pochowski and Meredyth Sanders with Kittleson; and Matthew Darst and Eduardo Sanchez. The folks mentioned here are much smarter than me, so most of the brain work was done by my co-authors.
So, what I am going to talk about today will follow the flow of the paper, so I will start off with the literature review, and then focus most of my presentation on the incremental approach that DDOT took to curbside freight management. I will talk about previous efforts, current efforts, and where do we go from here. Then, we will do a quick wrap up. So, I'll go through some of the sides very quickly, but it is based on the paper, so if you want more details, you are welcome to take a look at the paper as well.
So, curbside management is a very critical component. Curbside is a valuable asset in any urban area, and DC is no different. There is a big connection between mobility and safety and how effectively we manage our curbside. And freight loading zones are a big piece of that puzzle. So, the [focus] for today is going to be on street commercial loading zones.
As part of the paper, we did a quick literature review. They fall into the six broad categories mentioned here, but they fall into basically 2 or 3 major buckets. The first piece is kind of what different agencies around the world have done in terms of identifying what commercial loading zones they actually have on the street, mapping them, getting the characteristics of them, whether they are in the right location. The next level up was trying to apply some policy guidelines around those, to kind of match supply and demand. There were two levels: one was price, how do you price them, and time was the other policy level. Under that is kind of how do you adjust delivery windows so that you take into account the mobility impacts of delivery as well? The third piece was slightly advanced techniques. There were agencies that kind of tried advanced reservation systems, and then there are some instances, globally, where people have given preferences to electric trucks and green loading zones. So, kind of incentivizing alternative fuel vehicles in their curbside management strategies.
In terms of what DDOT has done, I think the best way to explain is that we have taken a systematic but incremental approach to managing our freight in the nation's capital. So, I will talk about previous strategies, current strategies, and then where do we go from here.
In terms of what we have done already, we started the effort in 2010. So, we started off with the very basics, right? If you want to deliver freight in the District, what routes can you use? That was based on roadway classification, a review by the planners, we got some feedback from the industry and the community, and then did some field observations. The next step was in 2013, we did a complete inventory of all of our loading zones and we had about 580 loading zones in the District. Again, these are on-street facilities and about the characteristics of them, the length, the side of the street they are on, et cetera. Once we had collected all that information, we put it on a map so that the industry and folks involved in this could get the information and plan their trips accordingly. And then, in 2014, we did a research project with a summer intern. There is a TRB paper on this so I will not go into detail, but this was basically a freight trip generation model and it could be applied to review applications as they come in for businesses and they apply for a loading zone. This has not become mainstream yet in DDOT, but we are looking at opportunities to see how we can perhaps incorporate this into our standard practices. Again, there is a TRB paper on this and if anybody is interested, I can give you the exact TRR number.
So, one of the big changes that happened in our on-street parking world was when we introduced Pay-by-Cell as a payment mechanism for our metered on-street parking. So, in 2015, this was a big change here; we actually started pricing loading zones. The prevailing rate at that time was $2.30 per hour and we started pricing loading zones at the prevailing rate. But we had launched Pay-by-Cell, and what we did was instead of putting a meter at a loading zone we thought why don't we designate a unique number to each loading zone and people could pay through the Pay-by-Cell app for the loading zone. So, there was that method of payment, and then we recognized that not everybody was going to download an app and use it as a payment mechanism, so we also had the option of people buying either an annual permit or a daily permit. But what was interesting was that the Pay-by-Cell transactions gave us some insight into how the loading zones were operating on a real-time basis. So, these are a couple of data elements that we gathered from Pay-by-Cell. This is 2015, which is when we started pricing our loading zones. And this is all of the transactions that happened on our loading zones. And on the right here is transactions that were done by trucks. So, this raises a couple of interesting points. Number one is that it seems like the usage of loading zones improved as the program matured, right? So, we had about 5,000 transactions in January, but that doubled by June. That was an interesting part, but what we found was that truck transactions at loading zones were really a very small percentage of the overall transactions. What that meant was there were lots of regular vehicles that were not supposed to be in our loading zones that were actually doing Pay-by-Cell transactions and using our loading zones. There were 35 loading zones where this was very prevalent. By very prevalent, I mean that it was two standard deviations away from the mean. Then, these two graphics are pretty intuitive. This is basically the intensity of usage of the loading zones, and again, no surprises here. The most intense use is in the CBD and is aligned with where most of the commercial activity is. Again, the Pay-by-Cell data gave us some insights into how the loading zones were operating almost on a real-time basis.
We did take a look at citation data, parking violation data, as it relates to loading zones. We looked at three things: double parking, loading zone payment and overtime violations, and non-truck parking in loading zones. What is interesting here is that the number of violations reduced. If you compare 2009 to 2012, versus 2013 to 2015, it seems like there is a downward trend, but we did some statistical analysis and believe that this had less to do with any policy changes that we did, but more of a function of how enforcement worked, and what their priorities were. I think it is probably not wise to draw any conclusions from this.
So, this is again summarizing what we found, that there are loading zones that are occupied by unauthorized vehicles. We used this data when we migrated to develop pricing strategies for Penn Quarter and Chinatown during our Value Pricing Pilot.
Some of the recent developments here is we did an interactive oversized overweight routing map. So, somebody that was driving into the city could enter their vehicle characteristics and could enter their origin and destination, and it would give you the most efficient way to get from point A to point B. Then, I am going to spend a little bit of time on how we applied pricing strategies to freight deliveries and commercial zones as part of the Penn Quarter/Chinatown project.
So, the Penn Quarter/Chinatown, as I mentioned it was a pilot in the Chinatown and Penn Quarter area. It's a very dynamic area that includes different kinds of modes. So, these are the bikeshare stations, some of the busiest metro stops, it has the Capital One Arena right in the middle, the National Portrait Gallery, freeways on the east side, major bus routes; so, it is a very dynamic area. I think the multi-model nature of this area lent itself to trying to figure out pricing is on congestion and safety. Part of the pilot area included 30 loading zones, and we did apply dynamic pricing strategies to these 30 loading zones.
As part of the pilot, we collected extensive data on our loading zones. We did a before and after analysis. Late 2016 was when we did our first pricing change based on usage. So, we collected loading zone data before that. Then our last pricing change as part of the pilot was in 2017. So, after our fifth price change, we went in and collected more data to see what the impacts of pricing were on our loading zone. These were based on time-lapse cameras. These are different loading zones, so we collected time-lapse cameras on 16 loading zones. This gives you an indication, for a specific day, and during different time slices, the usage of the loading zones, right? The red color is a bus, the blue is commercial vehicles, the oranges passenger cars, and if it is vacant it is this light blue. What is interesting here is the amount of orange that you see in the loading zones. Again, these are vehicles that are not supposed to be in the loading zones but were using it. So, at that time, when we started the pilot, we kept the loading zone pricing at a flat rate pricing. In 8 of the 16 loading zones that we observed through time-lapse cameras, they were occupied by passenger vehicles more than 50% of the time, right? And 13 of the 16 loading zones experienced a greater number of unique passenger vehicle parking sessions than all other vehicle types, which again, goes to people kind of abusing loading zones as regular parking spaces. Again, this was very symptomatic throughout the Penn Quarter/Chinatown area. The orange is what is problematic, right?
So, what we did was think about what policy levels we could put to kind of take the incentive for bad behavior away. The theory was that people were parking in the loading zone because we kept the pricing of the loading zone at $2.30, whereas the remaining block spaces, depending on the time of day, it could be at a higher price point. So, there was a financial incentive for people to park in the loading zones. We wanted to take that incentive away, and what we did as part of the pilot was, we priced the loading zone at the highest prevailing rate for that entire block. So, from a financial standpoint, there was no longer an incentive for people to abuse the loading zones. Then we went back and collected data in 2017, which was after the fifth price change. What we saw was there was a slight increase, again, it is not a huge sample, but we did see a slight increase in the number of double parking, but the total amount of time the vehicles spent double parking actually decreased, which has significant impacts on mobility and traffic flow and safety. That was one of the positives that came out of it. Then, the other thing that we did, we actually collected, again, time-lapse data, for each day and for each loading zone, and we observed vehicles that were double parking. Again, we talked about this in the paper. I am running out of time, so I won't go through this in great detail, but I will be happy to answer any questions later, or you can look at the paper as well.
So, where do we go from here? In terms of where the District is moving, based on the data that we collected, there is an opportunity for targeted enforcement, to kind of use our resources better in the District. Ninety percent of the parking tickets are issued by the Department of Public Works, and we have inter-agency parking related meetings, and we kind of bring all of this data forward so that they can kind of allocate their resources more effectively so that we as a city can make better use of the loading zones. Increased incentives for violations; we are looking at the fee structure and looking at the fines for regular vehicles that are ticketed parking in a loading zone. We are looking at opportunities, we are expanding value pricing to our baseball stadium zones. So, the stadium zone, during event days, it has a graduated pricing structure for regular vehicles. We are $2.30 for the first hour, and $8.00 for each subsequent hour, and we are trying to apply that philosophy to loading zones as well. Then we are looking at data-driven modifications to the loading zone program. So, how can we make our loading zones easily understandable, how can we disaggregate different kind of usage that we are seeing on loading zones? We are seeing typically now with on-demand delivery vehicles, we see two kinds of usage of loading zones. One is the loading/unloading function, and the other one is a storage function. The time durations for both of these functions are different, so are there opportunities to disaggregate the usage based on the length of time it takes to perform those functions? Then, we are looking at opportunities to improve our signage along truck routes, and then dealing with on-demand deliveries.
So, I will stop here, and I will be happy to answer any questions that there might be. Thank you very much. The last slide here has a contact information for all of the authors. If you do not get to your question today, please feel free to reach out to any of us and we will be happy to follow-up.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you, Soumya. Our next presentation will be given by Gabriela Giron, a Ph.D. student at the Urban Freight Lab at the University of Washington (UW). She is a Fulbright Scholar recipient and a member of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) Urban Freight Transportation Committee. Her research focuses on urban goods delivery systems, land use, and urban transportation infrastructure planning and management.
Gabriela Giron
Hello, everyone. Thank you for being here and thank you for the opportunity for me to present this work. Today, I am presenting the results of a paper that we already published in TRB, and that we presented in 2018. This is the result of a curb study that we did in the most strained, intense area of the CBD of Seattle. This is the result of our work that Jose Machado, Dr. Anne Goodchild, and I have done. So, with the rapid urban growth, e-commerce has been increasing and higher customer expectations, the challenges of the overall freight system have amplified, including the increasing challenge to find a space to park. Part of our work has been to identify those network elements that provide the space for vehicles to park and load and unload operations. Because commercial operations rely on that set of nodes and links that provide those different operations that occur, particularly the loading/unloading infrastructures, those important set of nodes that provide the connections to the driver to do the non-motorized part of the procedure, which is moving from the parking to the final destination for the receiver of that service.
For commercial vehicles, either for goods transportation, construction, or provision of the different services, the lack of parking spaces and parking policies that do not recognize those vehicle's unique needs for delivery drivers either to search for vacant spaces or to park in unauthorized spaces which can negatively impact the road capacity causing inconvenience or unsafe situations. These are all pictures that we have for the city of Seattle. So, the competition for space has increased even with new users that we recognize on the streets, particularly the red zones for pickup and drop off for passenger transit. We have seen a sharp growth in ride hailing services like Uber and Lyft. In 2018 the Seattle Times said that Seattle has the 3rd, 91,000 ride hailing rides, a five times increase in the level that was observed in 2015.
All of these changes have put a pressure on local government to think how we manage the street curb parking. Adjusting to the new and changing demands in the urban environment. As the city creates parking policies, how as researches can we provide data insights to the decision making process? This research, and all of the different projects that we have in the lab, we tried to obtain evidence to support that process, particularly for this research. We are trying to bring light for the first time in Seattle to how those commercial vehicle operations happen in the urban center. At the moment when we did this research, the city of Seattle only had collected and reviewed data is on paid parking areas in the city, which was the only quantities and agencies to measure parking operations at the curb. But this data was used to set and adjust on-street parking rates through the performance-based pricing policies but have no emphasis on the commercial vehicle parking operations.
The city of Seattle was the number one growing U.S city in the last decade. With a lot of geographical constraints, with bodies of water all around, we tend to move north to south and west to east. And also a lot of new projects and transportation investment, the city asked the question, how can we accommodate growth? How do we manage the demand for space? Before answering those questions, we wanted to answer two important questions, which are: What is the current capacity providing space for those operations? And how is it being used?
Part of the work that we have been doing in the lab is to first answer the question, what is the current capacity. So, we have done a comprehensive inventory that we have built up to go and collect a survey of the different infrastructures. The one I showed on the first slide, those different load/unloading infrastructures, including the private loading/unloading, and also the alleys of some cities in the U.S., including Washington, D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, and [?] are really important set of alley network that can provide not only space to do loading, but also space to park. I wanted to highlight this one for the private loading/unloading infrastructure is that 87% of Seattle center buildings rely solely on deliveries from the curb or alleys. So, it is important to document the public parking spaces.
The next step after doing that inventory was two occupancy studies. One is for the alleys and one is for the curbs, to try to understand how those spaces are being used. So, for the curb, we wanted to answer a few different questions. The first is where were commercials vehicles parking. We did an assessment of the areas that we defined for this research. We wanted to highlight some of the different curb designations that the city of Seattle has established. For example, for the load zones, they have established 30 minute time restrictions for commercial vehicles or load/unload operations. It is important to mention the city of Seattle gives commercial permits, and they don't necessarily have to be the traditional trucks, it could also be private passenger configurations. And then we have time limit restrictions for passenger loading only. We also have bus lanes, no stops tow away zones, 2 hour paid parking spaces.
The second question was what is the commercial vehicle fleet configuration? It is not only important to know where these vehicles are parked, but what types of activities they are doing. We usually use the word freight to put them altogether, however, we need to understand that there is a set of delivery service, construction, and garbage trucks, some may have different needs, and may be using the space in a different way. So, these are all of the different categories of every single commercial vehicle that we looked at. Particularly for delivery vehicles, we captured if it was a trailer, a box truck, or a cargo van, and we also captured cargo bikes.
The third question is, who is using the commercial vehicle load zones? So, we captured every single commercial load zone in the area of the study, but for the commercial vehicle load zones only, we captured other categories of vehicles, including taxis, public transit, passenger vehicles, motorcycles, etc.
The study was conducted in a three by three city block around 5 different buildings. These were particular buildings we intentionally chose it to understand the goods delivery system. Because previously, as part of all of our resource apart from the inventory, we did an important research project that mapped the process flow inside of building environments. We captured the dwell times of operations of those buildings. So, in order to provide a new layer of information on how the freight infrastructure is being used, we used those same buildings that have different uses, which includes a hotel, a historic commercial building, a residential tower, a high-rise office building, and a retail center. That is also published in TRR. If you want to look at the maps of the process, please let me know.
Due to the changes of [?] facility and complexity of vehicles and behavior, the curb observation study involved the use of human observers to collect data in the field. The researchers did find positions for them for collecting the data. The 6 locations would provide the collector with a clear view to record each of the parking operations of interest, meaning all the commercial vehicles that were parked alongside of areas and all of the noncommercial vehicles parked in those commercial load zones. And they collected this data in time precision that we designed as on per minute. So, every minute the human observer was looking at the different curbs that were assigned to them and to recorded anything in terms of parking operations and where those vehicles were parked.
In this occupancy study, we collected data from the morning peak from each different building. We did find a peak based on the study that I previously mentioned. Except for the residential tower, and we assume that those deliveries are more spread out throughout the day, so we collected data from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. The data collected provided a sample of around 2,000 on-street parking operations, with a set of 1,254 commercial and the rest noncommercial operations that parked in the load zones.
So, I am just presenting here the curb occupancy findings. We have also published the Alley Inventory and the Alley Occupancy Findings, and if you want that I can provide that to you.
For our findings for the curb. The first one that I want to highlight is, as per the previous presentation, we see a lot of unauthorized parking. For the commercial vehicles, only 1/3 of them were parked in the commercial vehicle load zone with 21% of them being in the metered parking, which they are allowed to. But that 41% of unauthorized parking is mainly passenger load zones. If you remember I showed previously that restriction for passenger load and unload. So, for the second finding, we see that commercial and passenger vehicles are using the space in a fluid manner. We see 26% of all commercial vehicles were parked in a PLC. Those were faster operations than we see and any other spaces. On the commercial load zones, 52% were passenger vehicles. Also, they had really fast operation; half of them were only there for five minutes. It is important for me to mention that in the city of Seattle gives permits also to passenger vehicles, and since we were collecting from these locations, it was harder for the data collector to identify if the vehicle had a permit or not. So, we do not know if what the percentage of those passenger vehicles had that permit.
The third finding is that commercial dwell times are mostly short, but some operations clearly take longer. It is important to recognize that we are not talking just a group of commercial vehicles, but that they have their own needs, and they need their different times that may require the different nature of those operations. So, when we look at all of the commercial vehicles, we have 70% of them were in compliance. Remember, the city of Seattle has a 30 minute restriction, so that is why we are plotting 30 minutes or less. And almost 30% of them were not in compliance. When we take a look at those delivery vehicles, or those trailer, box drops, and cargo vans, they had faster operations, with 81% of them in that 30 minute block.
When we took a look at the service vehicles, the parking behavior service was divided between those 30 minutes or less, or more than 30 minutes. Particularly, we have 27 of them parked for more than an hour, in that space, compared to all commercial vehicles, that only 14 of them stay more than one hour, and 27 of them for more than 30 minutes. This one is important, since service vehicles make up a picture of total commercial vehicles at the curb, these may have disproportionate impact on the parking space turn rates. We have denser areas, and there is a bigger need for maintenance, plumbing, I.T.; we need to understand how we provide the right space for them, so we can have higher turnout rates at the curb and we can make that space managed more efficiently.
Finally, the research team has developed and implemented a better collection method to quantify the usage of the curb in the more constrained areas in the downtown area of Seattle. This paper provides an initial and deeper input about the current behavior and gives opportunity to revise existing parking policies regarding usage restrictions, time restrictions, and space management. This shows a picture of commercial users parking in the on-street parking infrastructure who were not in compliance with the current parking management studies. The research displays the importance of providing tailored solutions to consider the inspection of the different load and unload operations. For example, servicing trips could skew the dwell time distribution of all commercial vehicles, as they tend to take most of the longer commercial vehicle parking operations.
Also, I wanted to say that we don't only need to provide enough capacity, but think about what is the adequate infrastructure? These spaces provide a space for the vehicles to park, remembering that there is a node of part of that big network that provides that connection to that final customer or the receiver of that service. Not only how much space, but where do we allocate it? What is the design of that space, not only to provide space for the vehicle, but space to load and unload? What is the slope of the infrastructure that provides the connection? Do we have lanes or ramps to allow for those operations to happen in a safe manner?
Finally, I want to say that we have been doing a lot of work in our lab. I already mentioned previous projects that have already been published. We don't only have papers, but if you go to our website, there will be a toolkit on how to use the different methods that we have created from the occupancy studies to the app for the inventory for the different infrastructure. But also, now, we have continued using all of this data that these different projects have provided, also to analyze some other things published on our website. And now particularly I wanted to highlight two projects. One is to think about the MicroHub; how do we reduce time on the curb, but also, how do we reduce when we don't make that delivery, the first delivery, that failed delivery as we may call it. Then, finally, this is a really long name for the biggest projects that we have in our lab. But, that project, we want to think about how do we apply a parking occupancy system thinking about sensory deployment and creating an app in real time that will provide real-time information for drivers? We can collect that occupancy data in real-time, and then we can use that for better analysis of an occupancy study, but also providing that to the drivers so they know that space is actually available. And also, the use of common parcel lockers, and that is one of the pilot projects that we have and are working on. If you want information on any of those studies, feel free to reach out to me or you can access the website. Thank you very much for your time.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you, Gabriela. Our final presentation will be given by Anurag Komanduri, a Principal at Cambridge Systematics who leads their Data Analytics practice. In this role, he helps transportation agencies build strong data governance practices and embrace a data-driven culture. He is the product owner of CS' location-based services product, LOCUS. In the past 2 years, he has led a wide variety of data collection and analytics efforts to improve planning and operations, including the California Vehicle Inventory and Use Survey and transit system redesigns in Los Angeles, Denver, and Boston.
Anurag Komanduri
Thank you, Jennifer. Thank you, also, to the two presenters who went ahead of me. I think you did a great job and set me up for failure in my presentation, but I will try to keep up. I will talk a little bit about the findings of some curb work that we did in California, specifically Los Angeles. Again, we know that the curb is a very interesting space; everything is now coming together there. You have people on bicycles, people with disabilities who need to access the curb, walking, buses, ride hailing, and commercial vehicles. So, there are a lot of implications if the curb is not managed well. From an internal perspective, from an agency-wide perspective, you can have delayed transit service and challenges with safety and congestion. As my presenter showed before, challenges even getting delivery done in a proper manner. There are challenges on the internal agency side as well. There is no consistent digitization that is happening. There is a lot of information that is known anecdotally but not consistently or in an automated fashion. This results in delayed projects, increased costs, a lot more enforcement challenges, and the inability to answer what is exactly happening in different curb spaces, and where, and what the conflicts might be and how safety can be improved. Most cities are reacting to issues rather than proactively planning for them, and this is time-consuming as well. Again, these are all known challenges, and these have been exacerbated by increased use of ride hailing, but also now a lot more e-delivery and e-commerce.
So, I see three common challenges in this entire realm of understanding with commercial vehicle delivery and the curb usage. One is, what type of data are we collecting? I saw a couple of questions that were asked in the comments for the earlier presenters. What are delivery vehicles? These are not your large trucks anymore; you have sedans, you have vans, you have bicycles. People are delivering in all kinds of vehicles. How do you keep track of what is happening? How do you measure what is a parking violation? When and where are these issues happening? Then the second part of this is, how can these data collection challenges be scaled? How do you build them out so they can be citywide or regionwide? So, there is some consistency across the board. I am based in Los Angeles and we are a collection of a big city, but a lot of small towns as well. So, how can you have consistent policies that operate across the region so that helps the business, but also helps the citizens on how to best use these systems? And then finally, what steps do agencies need to take to maximize innovation and maximize the use of the curb? These are not easy undertakings. We are digitizing the asset, and it is super challenging. The times we live in, city budgets are strained, we all are aware of that. So, I will talk a little bit about the work we have done in each of these 3 areas that I see as broad pressing challenges, specifically in the area of commercial vehicles, and I will give you a flavor of what we have been up to.
The first one, from a TRB paper that me and my colleagues presented at the last year's TRB session is the work that was sponsored through Caltrans where we actually collect the data about truck violations, very similar to what Gabriela presented previously. But we chose a lot of locations across both southern and northern California, and then when we looked at Southern California, we also broke it down to downtown business, but also some residential areas like Koreatown, Santa Monica, and Irvine, which is sort of a semi urban business Park. We also collected location sites in northern California in Oakland, Berkeley, and different parts of Berkeley.
Again, the study area was divided into walkable loops. We did this very old school; we had people walking with a pen and paper and keeping track of the number of trucks that we see. People made multiple loops across the walking area so they could see the same trucks parked at the same location. We took images. We went around in teams of two, so people were trying to see some of the sedans, you could guess that they were a business, right? In some case you would have been Uber or an Uber Eats sign show up; it was not Uber Eats back then, but you could see some of the symbols. You could also see a business logo on the side of pickup trucks. And we were using that information to get a sense of what is the mix of vehicles that are providing a commercial service. We collected the data primarily during business hours just to understand when the maximum impact was. Again, here is the spreadsheet. We kept track of all of the locations, we kept track of the closest store as well. There was another question asked of people are parked for a long time because they do not have parking and they are walking further away? We did track the business closest to where the truck was parked, but we did note that this may or may not be the business at these parked vehicles are actually servicing. We did not have an answer, we did not do any interviews, this was all passive and observed data collection. We entered the information into our spreadsheet and then built a database out of it.
The kind of information we collected is the exact location, what type of vehicle it was, the time of day when the observation was made, and then we made multiple loops, like I said, to understand parking duration. And then we had some information about whether the parking was curbside, in a parking lot, in an alley, whether it was legal or not legal. And for some of the largest companies like FedEx and U.P.S. and even some USPS vehicles, we tried to keep track of how many of those vehicles we were seeing. We did observe that the same U.P.S. truck would service the block as we walked around, so we kept track of license plates in some cases as well. In all of the course of the data collection, we saw about 2,200 vehicles totally that we tracked. A large portion of this was in downtown L.A., where we had 5 different sites that we were tracking. So, we had some variation, but a lot of the variation or where we could make some good inferences were primarily downtown.
Here is the distribution of the time of day at each of these locations. You can see, it varies quite a bit. You go from location to location, right? You go to Santa Monica, for instance, and a lot of vehicles are parked early in the morning between 8:00 at 10:00. Then you see downtown Los Angeles, for instance, and a majority of the vehicles seem to be parked from 10:00 to 12:00, or later in the afternoon, which is 2:00 to 4:00. There is quite a bit of variation depending on the location you are looking at and collecting data. We also saw a wide variety of vehicles that showed up. If you look at downtown L.A., for instance, there is a very strong distribution across a lot of different vehicle classes, some of which is driven by the lack of parking on the street for larger vehicles. So, I think things are broken down into smaller vehicles for running these. But then if you look at places where parking is more ample, you see some of the larger trucks show up on a more regular basis. Clearly, there is a variation; I think that is driven a little by supply.
And then, in downtown Los Angeles, we started walking multiple laps of each of these locations and we tried to see how many trucks actually showed up in the first, second, and third lap that we did and tried to get a sense of duration. Again, it is interesting, in the 12:00 to 2:00 period, which is around lunch time, a lot of the vehicles we saw were in and out quickly, but for the other time periods they were there for a longer duration. It may have to do with the fact that we have a lunch break and so did these people running these vehicles. So, maybe they try not to have long appointments, or are not servicing for a long duration at that point, but you see some variability across time of day as well.
And then this is a guess of parking violations, right? We are not clear where some in some cases some vehicles may have had specific permits, like the DC study which was done more from a city perspective. But we saw a good bit of violations, and again, it varied by time of day. What we did observe is that there are a lot of government vehicles, which are small trucks, which are providing either water, sanitation, or another public service. They were parked and what are the legal spots for time that if I parked my car I would definitely get a ticket, but I think that is a slightly broader appeal and they are providing services they can get away with where they parked. A good chunk of vehicles that we saw that were doing parking violations were government vehicles.
Again, we have lots more takeaways, but I wanted to keep this short. We did see a lot of variability of behavior, and we were able to capture commercial vehicle activity that is not widely available by the mix of vehicles that we are capturing and where exactly this is happening in the area that we studied. But one of the biggest challenges the scalability; how we take this time-consuming effort and apply it to a larger area. So, for the past couple of years, we have been building out a location based services product. Again, for those of you in transportation, you know this. Our smartphones collect a lot of information, and you can use this to identify travel patterns and travel behavior. So, we have built this product from the ground up; it is called Locus. Some of the steps that we take are identifying activity stays and trip ends. These are the critical aspects to understand curb usage and we have expanded the data to make it more representative of what is happening, showing hotspots of where the devices are actually showing up. So, we have been taken all of Los Angeles and divided them into very small hexagons. These are 3/10 of a mile that can be made even smaller. We start identifying where there is a big chunk of activity happening, and it is activity by time of day. You can also look at the activity by duration. So, if people are staying for 8 hours or 6 hours, it is unlikely that people are parking on the curb; they have a parking lot or other solutions, because these are continuous and regular activities. But when you see a lot of 1 to 2 hour activity patterns, you can start highlighting these hexagons and see where you see a lot of activity change happening. I would say that this is more agnostic. I cannot say these are all commercial vehicles or bicycles or transit vehicles. What we can do with this methodology is it helps us identify activity hotspots quickly and then it allows the city and the agency to prioritize and plan which parts of the city require some more deeper dives. And this is where either video monitoring or some of the very old-school data collection that we mentioned, or even digitization of the curb, can be prioritized. So, we see this as a way to get that step in a more organized fashion.
Then, finally, we also worked on a project with LADOT and it is called Code the Curb. The work we did here is to actually help the city think through what it needs to actually get the curb working in digital fashion. So, again, the challenges are we want to measure activity. I showed you how we can start building some of this out with economized data, or with actual information from parking meters that can be digitized. How do you manage it and how do you set clear guidelines? The key is to actually understand the curb, understand the mix of who uses it, who owns the curb, who owns the road space, who owns the bus stop, and how do you make all of this work together consistently? And then the key, which is where digitization becomes a big deal, is how do you monitor it in a systematic fashion? And then finally, once you have these organized well, then you can start optimizing, you can measure changes and track changes and build a system that is equitable and beneficial for all involved.
So, our study with the L.A.D.O.T. focused on three phases, which the first phase is assess the existing conditions. Where are we? What are the challenges? How does the agency operate today? What are the pros and cons? What forms are used? What software is used? Or is the software consistent across the different departments within the agency? What information is collected? What is not? The second part is to start blueprinting the future, which is now you know where we are, let's develop a vision for the city to say where they want to be, and then make sure that these goals are aligned with overall organization goals, with metrics of safety and equity and performance that are tied to the city's measures. And then, start tackling where we are today with where we want to be, and what are the gaps. These two parts are relatively easy because there is a lot of energy from agencies to try and understand the curb better and build systems which can digitize, but part C is the critical piece, right? How do we get there? How do we do all of these building blocks and how do we build technology and solutions that will get us there? This is extensive. It requires a lot of training of staff, reeducation. It requires buy-in from all of the agency partners. And how then can we move forward, especially when there are budget issues. This has been driven by what has happened this year and how cities have had to react to other issues and challenges that they have had to face, and how can they reframe their activities while trying to meet these goals.
So, at the end of this study, we helped the agency come up with three broad categories. One is establishing, which is here is where we need to build the foundation of data and information; so, good technology and good processes. This is your baseline, right? And we have 14 activities outlined there. I will not get into details through this presentation. You can reach out to me and I'm happy to put you in touch with our colleagues who have led this effort. Then, how do you extend this effort to build better plans and policies? And here budget becomes very critical. And the final thing is enduring, you need to make sure that these systems and procedures are in place so that no matter who is running the organization, who is in the organization, people have a clear understanding of the software, the technology, the program goals, and the performance measures that are being tracked. This actually seems easy to do, but it becomes harder and harder because every department within an agency tends to be very siloed, so how do you break down these barriers. All of these are critical aspects. Understanding the vehicles is one critical aspect of that, but it is broader in scope. I just wanted to give of flavor of 3 to 4 broad topic areas that we worked on specifically in the Los Angeles area over the past 18 months, to give you a sense of what the challenges are, and what methodologies are needed to get to that point. That is it.
Jennifer Symoun
All right. Thank you. So, thank you for your presentation, Anurag. I know we have a number of questions typed in. We are going to go to those now. Soumya, I see you have been typing in some answers as we go and that has been helpful. What I am going to do, actually, is start with questions for Gabriela, and give people a chance to type in any questions for Anurag. Then we can also go back and look at the questions for Soumya as well, and get more details on some of the answers that he has typed in. In the meantime, please feel free to continue asking questions. So, Gabriela, a question for you is, to what degree is dwell time by delivery vehicles lengthened by having too few, such that drivers need to walk further to reach the recipient?
Gabriela Giron
Thank you for the question. So, it is not clear to me what it means by having too few. I am guessing too few parking spaces. What I want to highlight is that we put a lot of attention to that dwell time and how that curb is being used. It is important to remember that that dwell time will be highly dependent on the operations that happen after that truck driver leaves the vehicle. So, when we think about that dwell time, how we can reduce it, we need to think about that last node of that delivery operation. Where is that delivery going to be, not only on distance, or how much he needs to walk, but also when thinking about urban dense areas we have vertical movement, too. So, how do we get to that last destination, either on the second floor, the third floor, or whatever it is, we need a signature. What is the building environment? Not only that, but how we provide the walking time, it will be defined by the signal and the bike lanes that are in that area. So, it is important to think about where we provide that space, but also how can we improve the operations inside the building environment. Are we providing a lobby lockers, microhubs? Those are the things that we are trying in the lab and other research, too. How we can concentrate in a particular area so we can reduce the dwell time that the driver happens to be outside of that vehicle.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you.
Anurag Komanduri
Hey, Jennifer? There is one thing I might be able to offer on that as well. So, when we were doing our literature review as part of our project, we came across this interesting statistic about 50 meters, or about 165 feet, being an optimal walking distance. And there is a study, which is cited as a reference in our paper, which says that if you are beyond that range, the propensity for double parking increases for delivery vehicles. So, it might be worthwhile to take a look at that as well.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you. I should have mentioned, any presenters feel free to jump in if you do want to respond to any of the questions. Let's see here, this next question came in during Gabriela's presentation, but it is actually for all presenters. Are there any insights on cargo e-bicycles for delivery and commercial purposes? Any insights on how these should be treated and encouraged? If anybody wants to just start off.
Gabriela Giron
Okay. So, I have not been particularly involved with the e-bikes, but our lab has been doing work with U.P.S., with a pilot study in the Seattle area trying e-bikes; thinking about safety and accessibility, and how we can improve those delivery routes. One thing to mention is that e-bikes will not carry the whole demand that we need for those good flows in our urban areas, if we think that we are just moving the congestion from the trucks to the bikes. But the e-bikes, those provide accessibility and potential of that space. Although they have less range, we need to think about how we can make that delivery system. Like I mentioned before, the microhub, or technology like we have seen in Europe and also in Seattle, the technology models are like cargo bikes where we can do those in faster and in combination with truck routes. So, thinking about that vertical, but also horizontal movement in the urban area, and how we can use the e-Bike in the most efficient way for the last piece of the delivery.
Jennifer Symoun
Anybody else?
Alright, let's see here. Anurag, a question for you. Have you, at Cambridge/LADOT, worked on how curbspace rules are available as an API for vendors like TNC's, food delivery, or urban goods companies?
Anurag Komanduri
That is a great question, thank you for asking. So, I will say this, and it is not just for LADOT, but also broadly. I think there are a lot of challenges to get to a point where everything is digitized and centrally located, to get to a point where you can start building this. I think the DC example is great; DC is a nice unique example of a well contained small city. Where if you start looking at the broader L.A. area, it is such a spread out region with so many different departments, right? There are divisions which control different parts of the city. I do not think we are there yet to get to all of these technologies built out, but these are all definitely part of the vision to start building a better asset management plan and a better data digitization system, to get to that point. Now to a certain degree you have seen that some of the parking has become digitized where you can pay for parking using your mobile phone and other solutions. So, there are ways, but it just needs to come a little bit further along before we can make this work well.
Jennifer Symoun
Alright, thank you. Let's see here, another question for all three of you. Thank you for your presentations. You gave us a lot to think about. What should the role be coming from the Federal Highway Administration? Should cities within an MPO work together?
Anurag Komanduri
I can take a crack at this, because I have seen the challenges of every city working with its own ideas. I do not know if it is MPO. Even the MPO is sort of an arbitrary boundary of where things start and end. But, definitely, collaboration across different cities is the key. You can come up and have efficiencies and standardized rules, which make it easier for the business partners. So, I think in general, this is a good idea. From an FHWA standpoint, it is a bit harder for me to say what the rule there would be. But I think sponsoring a bit more research on this topic, helping agencies think through what 5 or 6 steps they need to take to gain maturity would be a great way. It could be a handbook for cities and guide for cities to start taking and customizing for their own region, but it becomes a starting point for a well thought out playbook. So, I could see some role there and also having some coordination.
Jennifer Symoun
Anyone else?
Soumya Dey
Yeah, I think it is like peeling different layers of the onion, and Anurag kind of alluded to that. Each city and jurisdiction is unique. They have their own set of policy guidelines and legislative framework under which they have to operate. So, there are some decisions that have to be almost at an individual jurisdiction level, but what is important is, I think two things. Number one is kind of learning from each other in terms of best practices. I don't think we need to make the same mistakes that our neighbors made. So, I think that is one. And then the second point is the touch points, right? To make sure, and interoperability is probably not the right word, but to make the system seamless for somebody that is a freight vehicle or delivery vehicle that is going across a jurisdictional boundary. So, some level of consistency and seamless system as people go across jurisdictions.
Jennifer Symoun
Alright, thank you. Gabriela, anything you would like to add?
Gabriela Giron
Well, I think the two previous presenters gave great answers, and I agree with them. I also, as a researcher, I would say that collaboration is important. As we are trying to figure out these new trends, how do we accommodate the space most efficiently? Trying to collaborate between cities and researchers, and also, we know that the systems are really fragmented between the different private stakeholders, the business operators. So, how do we put in place an efficient way for those? And collaboration is a key, and learning from each other.
Soumya Dey
Jennifer, can I go one more? I just had one more follow-up. I think the other piece is, I think running the systematics step-by-step is key. I think we are in a world where platforms and technologies are trying to drive a solution, but I don't not know if that is necessarily the first step that every city must take, right? I think every city has its own policies and thoughts in place. Think through what is necessary for you tie yourself into a long-term deal with a technology or a solution or a system, because this may not be what you need two years from today. And it becomes more onerous to work with a system that you have designed without thinking of the future. I think all of these things are important. I can see a role for collaboration, coordination with roles with FHWA which would play very well there.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you. Soumya, we will go back to the questions for you and if you want to expand on anything you typed in. A few people asked about the TRR citation for the loading zone allocation model.
Soumya Dey
Yeah, so, I was actually chatting on the side with the author, who is now a DDOT employee; he had come in as a summer intern and done the work. We don't have the TRR publication for that, but there was a final presentation that he did, and he is trying to dig up the final report that he needed as part of his summer research. We can certainly get that out to folks that want it.
Jennifer Symoun
Alright, yes. Once you find that if you want to send it to me and I can send it out to all who registered.
Soumya Dey
Sure.
Jennifer Symoun
Next question. What happens if a delivery driver has a reservation for a specific loading zone and the loading zone is occupied by another vehicle when the delivery truck arrives?
Soumya Dey
Yeah, that is not a good situation. That is precisely one of the reasons why, again, DC had thought about it, but never pursued that. And our data kind of suggests that that was probably the right decision for us not to pursue that technology. But, based on our literature review, what we found was that there were two deterrents to using the advanced reservation system. One was precisely what is mentioned here that what if somebody pays for the parking spot and they go there and see there is a regular unauthorized vehicle there, or even maybe a truck that has not paid for the loading zone, right? That is number one. Number two is, given the level of congestion in many urban areas, sometimes delivery companies have problems meeting very tight delivery windows. So, if they have made a reservation for a specific time, and because of congestion they get delayed, then I think it is money not well spent, right? So, in our literature review, we found that those were the two major deterrents why this did not really take off, at least in most jurisdictions.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you. Do you charge a different rate for non-freight vehicles parking in loading zones?
Soumya Dey
Well, non-freight vehicles should not be parking in loading zones. But no, it is the same rate. Each loading zone has a unique rate. It does not separate between non-freight and freight.
Jennifer Symoun
Alright. Do you have any thoughts or evidence on how the DC loading zone strategy is either enhanced or inhibited by pedestrian and/or cyclist accommodating strategies?
Soumya Dey
Yeah, I think that is a great question. So, curbside is a very valuable asset, right? The challenge for the city becomes, and it's about how well you manage the curbside, how do the regulations affect mobility and safety. And the challenge for each city is to come up with the optimal strategy. Bikes and on-demand delivery, and TNC's are some of the new pressures on the curbside. So, it is a challenge for the cities, and they are striving to maintain that balance. In DC, for example, we are looking at ways, again, going back to the onion example, how do you look at the data and try to disaggregate the usage and see whether there is an opportunity to repurpose your curbside based on time of day. It doesn't have to be loading zones all of the time, it doesn't have to be a bus line all of the time, right? Or, even within the delivery window, are there opportunities to maybe stratify the loading zones based on expected duration of stay, right? So, we are doing a bus lane on 7th Street, and the issue of loading comes up, right? How do businesses on 7th Street still get their deliveries? So, are there opportunities to maybe do the quick turnaround delivery still on 7th Street, but the storage function goes onto the side street? So, it is kind of taking a database approach and looking at what the demand on the curbspace is and how you can align the supply with the demand. So, again, it is a very tough balance to manage. There are different stakeholders involved. Each of them probably have different viewpoints about what the final solution should look like, but that is the challenge that every urban area is facing.
Jennifer Symoun
Alright, thank you. Many commercial deliveries are made in cars and vans. Are such vehicles permitted to use commercial loading zones? If so, is there a way to distinguish these vehicles?
Soumya Dey
Yeah, I put our DCMR guidelines on the chat. But in addition to what I put in, I understand that TNC's, for example, are allowed to use the loading zones for quick pick-up and drop-off. And then, when it comes to vehicles, for example, an Uber Eats vehicle, the typical dwell time that we saw based on the study pilot we head on is 5-7 minutes for an Uber Eats vehicle, that is a very small window of time. But an enforcement officer comes in and finds a regular vehicle at a loading zone, it is oftentimes at the discretion of the officer, but they might end up with a ticket. But, I think the DCMR may specifically allow TNCs to use the loading zones for pickup and drop off.
Jennifer Symoun
Alright, thank you. We have another question that came in. This one I will put out in a presenter who wants to answer. This may seem overly broad at best, but do we have any sense that curbside parking and double parking habits are improving over time? We have been researching this issue and running pilots for years now, but at least in Boston, before COVID reduced passenger traffic and office habitation, it is the wild West. In fact, I see more parking with two wheels up on sidewalks than in recent years.
Anurag Komanduri
I think it is anecdotal at best. I'm sorry. Go ahead, Soumya.
Soumya Dey
Yeah, so, again, the only data-based discussion that I can offer is what we found during the Chinatown pilot. And what we found was that after we implemented some of the pricing strategies, the double parking situation did not improve, but the duration of time for which that double parking was happening, that was reduced by 43%. And, the rest of the information I have, would be anecdotal at best as Anurag mentioned.
Anurag Komanduri
Yeah, I have seen during the pandemic that there has been a lot more food deliveries. And the apartment building that I live in, there are cars parked like crazy between 6:00 and 9:00. So, I think even though we have more time at home, everyone is lazy to cook. So, I see that anecdote, but it is so anecdotal.
Gabriela Giron
Yeah, at my site, unfortunately we do not have data previously for the occupancy study regarding commercial vehicles. So, I would say that it is anecdotal, too. Hopefully with the research that we are doing and any new pilots we are implementing, we will be able to compare before and after to see if those studies that we implement it will make an improvement of those unauthorized behaviors.
Jennifer Symoun
Alright, thank you. Another question I will put out for all of the presenters. Can encouraging off-peak delivery help harmonize curb use by reducing demand of curb space during peak hours?
Soumya Dey
Yes. Lots of cities have had, and again, this is based off of the literature review, but lots of cities have had success with that. In fact, some cities have completely tried to push deliveries during the off-peak hours, which is after 7:00 p.m. And I forget off the top of my head, there were examples from around the world, and we kind of touch upon that in our literature review.
Anurag Komanduri
I will talk about it from the business perspective, right, which is yeah, it is great from a citywide perspective, some deliveries can move back, but you of the change the working conditions for people who probably are not paid a whole lot to do these deliveries. So, there is a big equity angle we need to think about as we make these policy changes for the working conditions of people who are delivering. So, it is not an easy question to answer, and I think there is a big personal choice, right? With Amazon prime, we think we can make three orders, one to buy two pens, a second one to buy a third pen, and then to buy a pencil in three separate orders and expect three separate deliveries. So, I think there is a consumer choice behavior which is driving a lot of these impacts as well. I think it is a bit of both sides, demand and the supply, which need to be controlled.
Gabriel Giron
I also agree. I think off-peak deliveries, there is a way to effectively harmonize and distribute that demand throughout the day and reduce the competition in those peak hours of the day. But I think the barriers might be that coordination, not only for the city, but as mentioned, for the business. How we have the people there, how much we have to pay? And a labor issue also. How much would that increased delivery cost for paying those drivers in the off-peak hours? So outside of the traditional business hours.
Jennifer Symoun
Alright, thank you. Soumya, I will put this to you, but anybody else feel free to jump in. Going back to one of your earlier reports on peak spreading study. Does the district or other jurisdiction encourage nighttime and early-morning loading? Can we manage the system more like Europe?
Soumya Dey
Whether we encourage it, well, if you take cues from the pricing strategies. So, our loading zones for example, we do not price them after 7:00 p.m., I believe. So, we don't have any policies in place that restrict people from delivering during regular working hours, but again, I think it is more of a business decision as to whether it makes more sense to deliver when you have less congestion on the roadways.
Jennifer Symoun
Anurag or Gabriela, any thoughts?
Anurag Komanduri
Nothing from me, sorry.
Gabriela Giron
No, nothing for me.
Jennifer Symoun
Alright, let's see here. One question did come in. It was sent directly to me, I think. I am not sure which presenter this was for, but I will ask it if anybody wants to respond. That is, how are you collecting the data and reporting it in a graphic format?
Soumya Dey
Can you repeat the question?
Jennifer Symoun
How are you collecting the data and recording it in graphic format? I am not sure which presentation that came in during.
Soumya Dey
I mean, if it is talking about the anonymized smartphone data that we are talking about, we are tracking it on a regular basis. And then, the one image that I had was a dashboard in Tableau, but it can be stored in any format. The other data collection we did, it was localized data collection and we had survey forms in Excel.
Jennifer Symoun
Alright, thank you. We are almost out of time, but I'm going to go ahead because we do have a few minutes left just to see if anybody wants to ask a question over the phone, just to give the opportunity. If you do want to ask the question over the phone, please press *5 and I will open your phone line. So, I will just give a minute to see if anybody wants to ask a question. That is star 5.
And I do not see any questions on the phone. So, I am going to go ahead and close out. Oh, another question just came in. Since L.A. and DC are leading in micro mobility, are there any lessons learned on how to manage both? And Seattle, too. So, again, if anybody wants to start up with a response.
Anurag Komanduri
I can take a crack. Again, I haven't looked at the micro mobility aspects, but as a resident here I see a lot of it. L.A. has been championing this user specification protocol for these micro mobility forms, which has wound its way up to multiple court cases. It is interesting to see this push and pull between public and private on understanding the utilization and data, while keeping privacy in mind. It is, I think it is still a very small percentage of all of our travel. It is concentrated and there are areas where there is a lot more activity. And it has been an issue in the beginning with the way things are dropped off at the curb, but things are getting better in establishing some rules. There are a few processes a bit better and the requirements are becoming more stringent to manage and partner with these companies that are coming forth with micro mobility ideas. I think it is also evolving. The pandemic and what will come later will have some impact on how these business models work. But still, there is reticence from the private sector on account of competitiveness of sharing a lot of information which can help manage both curb and road space a bit better. That is my sense from a 200 foot separation from the actual work that is going on.
Jennifer Symoun
Thanks. Any of the other presenters?
Soumya Dey
Yeah, I think the experience in DC is that, the philosophy in DC is that we want to give people multiple options or choices to get from point A to point B, and micro mobility is one of those options. It has been very popular when we did the initial pilots, but then it has come with some growing pains, right? About where these vehicles are stored, in an erratic fashion, how that impacts pedestrian safety and vehicular safety. And Anurag I think alluded to this, it is kind of having those tough discussions with the industry as it matures, and setting some guidelines and parameters in place, that we want them to abide by and creating a framework, so that we can kind of assess as to whether the companies are abiding by those guidelines, right? So, it is kind of a two-way street. Again, sometimes these are tough conversations to have, but I think it is all an indication of an industry that is maturing, and the jurisdictions trying to find out how to best accommodate that within our transportation framework.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you. And Gabriela, I think--
Gabriela Giron
Yes, I agree with the previous speakers. I will say, for Seattle, we have the city of Bellevue on Seattle that are speaking to those studies on how we can improve and get consolidation on the final delivery. Particularly interesting also from the business owners and managers on how to more efficient and secure the increase to the tenant delivery. So, part of our work is providing that database and trying to define the metrics that we need to really see how micro mobility can improve the final part of the delivery. That is the work that we are doing. We just started the microhub project within the city of Bellevue in Seattle. But we do not have the results yet.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you all for attending today's seminar. I will send out a link to the recording of today's webinar within the next day.
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