The Case Against Loading Zone Reservations

Why we use them, the fundamental flaws in theory and in practice, and an equitable & efficient alternative.

Aug 05, 2021

Traffic and congestion have thoroughly degraded the transportation experience in modern cities. Inefficient on-street parking, both private and commercial, is slowly being recognized as a driving force behind uncontrollable traffic levels that plague cities around the world. Commercial vehicle parking is especially problematic, with a recent study showing that delivery vehicles waste about 28% of their day cruising for parking1. The resulting traffic and congestion cause a myriad of issues, from financial losses to safety and environmental concerns.

While the categories of commercial curb users have expanded from simple parcel delivery to rideshare, food delivery, and micro-mobility, the policy side has lagged behind. Outdated loading zone allocation and regulation has only recently been identified as a target for change, as cities have slowly begun to invest in the optimization of their curbs. Numerous curb management pilots are sprouting up across the country, indicating that cities know the curb is integral to the overall productivity and safety of urban areas and want to improve it. Designated loading zones are far too scarce for indiscriminate commercial use, so cities have tried implementing flexible zones that can accommodate different types of parking to increase curb efficiency. However, flexible zones are still static: they allow cities to “react” to demand by setting different rules at different hours of the day. But demand is not static, setting cities down a never-ending path of chasing demand instead of managing it. The core problem here is that cities need a better way to anticipate demand beyond making predictions based on historical patterns.

The most popular solution to this problem has been to use booking apps, which use reservations to control who uses the loading zones, and for how long. Reservation systems, in theory, are supposed to collect user-generated data to anticipate demand. With this information, the rules of the dynamic loading zones should be able to be set as efficiently as possible. For static loading zones, reservations should at least inform commercial fleets which spaces are available and which are occupied. At this point, reservation systems seem like a good way more efficiently utilize loading zone space.

But loading zone reservations are fundamentally flawed in practice & in theory.

The first reason is practical: the massive commercial corporations whose vehicles dominate loading zones are unlikely to download a third-party app with a booking system. For one, whether they build it or buy it, every major commercial fleet spends millions or billions of dollars on routing software to optimize every minute of drive time. Similarly, getting fleets to just integrate is difficult without giving them significant incentive. Unless enforcement levels increase significantly, it wouldn’t make financial sense for companies to adopt a booking app. Companies like UPS and FedEx would prefer to pay for the occasional parking ticket than engage in a regulated reservation system that charges them the true cost of their drivers’ loading zone parking. This ticket strategy promotes dangerous driver behavior such as double parking, idling in no-stopping zones, blocking bus lanes, and obstructing fire hydrants. In New York City, it has forced the introduction of the Stipulated Fine Program, which discounts parking fines for commercial companies to avoid overwhelming traffic courts. In 2018 alone, NYC lost north of $20 million in revenue through the program2. In short, it doesn’t make sense for commercial fleets to adopt new booking apps that cost in both efficiency and parking fees themselves.

Loading zone reservations are also flawed in theory: they force the city to pick winners. The core problem is that demand exceeds supply—there is simply not enough curb space to provide adequate loading zones without taking space away from parking, transit, parklets, micro-mobility, etc. If loading zones operate through a reservation system, there must be winners and losers. The winners are fleets that can reserve the limited loading space, while the losers will be shut out from the loading zones. Cities are ultimately the managers of their curbs, and it is the cities that have to decide the winners and losers of the reservation game. Most likely, reservation winners would be chosen in either one of two ways: reservations will be granted to either the highest bidder or the earliest buyer. If loading zone reservations are dynamically priced and sold to the highest bidder, it gives an unfair and potentially dangerous advantage to the giant commercial fleets. It’s easy to imagine that a mega-corporation could (and would) buy out excessive curb space to both optimize its delivery vehicles’ efficiency and starve the competition, creating a delivery monopoly of sorts. So a bidding system wouldn’t work, but what if the reservations were opened at a certain time with a fixed price, operating on a first-come, first-served basis? Once again, demand exceeds supply, so the fixed price method would inevitably produce ties between companies vying for curb space and leave the city with the responsibility of choosing who gets it.

I’d like to clarify one thing—those are not the only options of a reservation system, the flaws can be mitigated (especially in cities that don’t have the density of NYC), and despite creating issues, reservation systems can be net-positive and are a critical step in the process of cutting down red tape for fundamental technologies to emerge.

My proposed alternative: the curb ledger.

Think of it like a list of ETAs for fleet vehicles currently navigating to a specific loading zone, with the shortest ETA at the top of the list. Anybody can see the ledger, providing more information to base individual routing decisions off of, which creates a far more efficient overall system without giving the city the power/responsibility to make decisions for them. The concept of information symmetry can also be seen with the stock market, where all investors having access to the same information creates the most efficient mechanism of price discovery. In theory, anyways.

As a real-world example, imagine a UPS truck and a FedEx truck that both have Loading Zone X in their routes for the day. After finishing the previous delivery, the UPS truck starts driving to Loading Zone X and automatically adds “ETA 10 min” to the ledger. Then, when the FedEx truck finishes its stop and also starts heading towards Loading Zone X, it connects to the ledger and knows that “somebody” will be there in 10 minutes. If the FedEx truck is 5 minutes away, it proceeds on the route and adds “ETA 5 min” to the top of the ledger. But if instead it was 15 minutes away, its routing engine would reevaluate and find the next-closest loading zone or even rearrange its route for the day and go to an entirely different delivery first.

In a technical context, the curb ledger is a transparent digital record for a given curb space that contains anonymized ETAs provided by routing software and verified by telematics systems. Whenever a fleet vehicle starts navigating to its next loading zone, its routing software connects to that particular loading zone’s ledger, adds its ETA, and sends telematics data so the ledger can verify based on location. Anonymity protects privacy and neutrality, telematics eliminates fraudulent ETAs, and the combination of both prevents bad actors from gaming the system while maintaining equitable access to the curb.

The last piece of the puzzle is enforcement—it doesn’t matter if a loading is occupied if you can just double park without getting a ticket. With a 1% chance of getting caught, fleets are better off following the optimal route set by the routing engine they spent millions if not billions on and consider any tickets as a cost of doing business. However, if we increase the enforcement capture rate to 90% or higher (likely with LPR-based cameras), suddenly the fleets are incentivized to channel their routing engine power into figuring out the optimal route without double parking, blocking bike lanes, parking in no parking zones, etc etc.

At the end of the day, enforcement is a tool for changing behavior. When combined with new technology like the curb ledger, real-time availability, and dynamic curb spaces, enforcement gives the extra incentive needed for fleets to overcome the inertia of “the way things are” and embrace new ways of doing things that will end up benefiting them. With curb management, transportation, and cities in general, it’s of vital importance that decisions are considered at the system-level so that one party doesn’t benefit at the direct expense of another. Think about it—if we just increased enforcement without also providing tools to be more efficient, fleets would ultimately pass that cost on to the consumer.

Fortunately, there’s enough room to improve curbside infrastructure for everybody to win: more city revenue, less double parking, increased fleet efficiency, less congestion, less emissions, and improved public safety. Eventually the curb ledger, combined with real-time data, LPR, and signage, will enable a truly flexible curb with dynamic rules and rates that respond to demand in real-time and better serve all types of users.