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Coord helps cities manage their streets, starting with the curb. Coord is the only comprehensive curb management platform, empowering cities with the necessary tools to digitally inventory, allocate, price and operate the curb at scale to help streets be more efficient, safe, and equitable.
Coord’s online platform helps cities digitally inventory, allocate, price and operate the curb.
Inventory: Coord’s augmented reality mobile app, Coord Collector, helps cities inventory their curbs so they know where the curb is, what’s on it, how it can be used, and who can use it at any given time. Coord’s “rules engine” technology automatically translates asset data collected using Coord Collector (or pre-existing asset data provided to Coord by a city) into dynamic regulations data, using each city’s municipal code, parking rate tables, and other information.
Allocate and price: Coord’s web app allows cities to easily visualize and analyze their curb space so they can align their curb space allocation and pricing with city priorities and communicate changes and tradeoffs to stakeholders. Both asset and regulation data is available to cities via Coord’s web app, which shows each curb’s permitted uses and how it changes by time of day.
Operate: Coord’s web app, the Coord Driver mobile app, the Coord Inspector app, and the Coord API work together to allow cities to operate their curbs through programs such as digitally managed Smart Zones.
Smart Zones are spaces along the curb cities digitally manage and operate. Using Coord, a city can flexibly designate who may use the space, when, for how long and at what price.
Drivers use a mobile app to see real-time availability of Smart Zones. The Coord Driver app allows users to route to and reserve a zone, and to book and pay for space in them. The same capabilities are available to users of fleet driver apps that have integrated with the Coord API.
Although Smart Zones today are most commonly supporting curbside commercial loading, the same technology can be used in a variety of other use cases and settings. Smart Zones can be used not only to manage curbs, but also to manage activity in alleys, loading docks and other spaces. They can also be used to better manage uses such as mobile vending, tour bus loading, passenger loading, and more.
If you have another challenge or program you’re interested in developing, please reach out to partners@coord.com.
Smart Zones help:
Improve safety for pedestrians and cyclists by reducing vehicles double-parking or blocking crosswalks.
Reduce congestion for delivery drivers trying to find an available, legal space to load or unload in an area. For a fleet or driver, shaving even a couple of minutes off each delivery saves valuable time and reduces aggravation.
Promote a more attractive downtown by making it easier for businesses to receive supplies and fulfill customer delivery requests, while improving the experience for people who visit the area.
Provide data to a city to make dynamic changes to pricing and time limits, with the ability to see where and when loading space is most needed, enabling efficient demand management
Read more about Smart Zones and their impact in Smart Zones Deliver: Full Aspen Case Study.
No. Coord programs are designed assuming no special technology is already in place. If desired by a city, Coord can integrate information from sensing technology, including traditional and camera-based sensors.
Fully automated enforcement would be great; however, it is unlikely that your city has the legal authority to send parking citations by mail without some type of manual process involved. For example, some cities are required to have a parking enforcement officer physically deliver a citation to a vehicle in violation. In some cities a manual review process is required for a citation to be issued based on camera footage, even if using cameras to detect violations is allowed.
Some cities are using technology such as vehicle-mounted license plate recognition cameras, cameras in meters, and sensors to provide information to support enforcement deployment. These technologies can help to identify whether a vehicle is properly using a space and can support demand-responsive enforcement and longer-term deployment strategy, but without the ability to issue citations by mail without human input, they do not fully automate enforcement.
The Coord Inspector mobile app and the Smart Zone program as a whole enable your city to enforce proper use of Smart Zones in a way that is real and achievable today, using the technology and legal authority your city likely already has in place. Enforcement officers are able to use an iPhone or Android device to get real-time information about whether a vehicle is properly using a Smart Zone so they can take appropriate enforcement action. They also receive instant alerts about unauthorized vehicles in Smart Zones, so if they are nearby, they can respond and take enforcement action for any unauthorized vehicles.
Many municipalities are interested in gaining authority to do more fully automated enforcement, and the benefits of doing so would be significant. When municipalities get this authority, it would integrate seamlessly into a Smart Zone program. In the meanwhile, Coord’s system provides a practical enforcement approach achievable in almost any city today.
With Coord’s hands-on program design and deployment support and our asset-light approach, most cities are ready to launch following a three- to four-month planning period. During this planning period, the Coord and city teams work together on program design, outreach to stakeholders (including local businesses, fleets, and drivers), and any asset installation (e.g., signage).
Drivers signed up with a Coord Driver account can use the app to find up-to-date location, hours, and pricing of Smart Zones. The app reflects real-time availability accounting for Zones that are full, Zones closed off temporarily by the City (e.g., if streets are closed off for construction), and Zones too small for a vehicle’s length.
In many cities, curb space is not currently allocated and priced in ways that support cities’ mobility, safety and sustainability goals. Cities looking to align their curb space allocations with their goals may have questions like:
Once a city has an inventory of its curb data (collected by Coord Collector or ingested into Coord from existing City datasets), Coord makes it easy to answer these questions. It does so through highly flexible digital maps and analytics dashboards allowing analysis of curb assets, regulations and occupancy; this video gives a brief overview of the capabilities.
Users can select the level of granularity at which they want to visualize or analyze their curb space, ranging from statistics for an individual curb or corridor to neighborhood summaries. Some ways Coord’s web app can support curb space allocation, pricing, planning and analysis include:
Alternative scenarios: Allows the City to test and calculate the impact of various hypothetical curb allocation or pricing scenarios, such as the impact on parking supply of different options for expanding micromobility parking. Once instituted, the City can publish the selected alternative and directly update its digital map with these changes.
Curb search: Allows the City to easily identify which curb segments match a highly customizable set of criteria. For example, a user can look for all contiguous stretches of curb 40 feet or longer in a study area that are adjacent to intersections or fire hydrants but do not contain loading zones or bus stops. This can provide a set of candidate sites to be evaluated for a new curb use the city is looking to introduce.
Occupancy view: Allows the City to measure curb-by-curb occupancy levels, displaying occupancy as either absolute percentages or relative to city-specific availability targets.
Yes. You can export data in your desired format, (GeoJSON or ESRI Shapefile).
These files are necessary to make the map:
These files are strongly recommended:
These files are nice to have:
Coord supports inventorying curb assets via (1) the Coord Collector augmented reality (AR) iPhone app, or (2) by ingesting and normalizing existing curb asset datasets that cities have. The Coord Collector app allows you to collect a wide array of curb assets (see the FAQ below for a non-exhaustive list). Anyone can learn to use Coord Collector through a 2-hour training - no special background is required.
This video walks through the basics of the Coord Collector app and what to expect during a collection.
Coord’s Collection Management web app allows you to efficiently manage multiple people collecting asset data with the Coord Collector app. This manual walks through the steps for setting up a collection in Collection Management and the capabilities of the tool.
Of course, curb users and managers need not only assets, but also regulations. Curb asset data collected or ingested by Coord passes through a comprehensive rules engine, specifically designed around the City’s municipal codes and regulations. The rules engine computes curb regulations from assets.
Currently, the Coord Collector app works on any iOS device that supports ARKit, which includes all iPhones, from iPhone SE to present, and all iPads from iPad Pro to present.
The assets included in the Coord Collector app are customizable, so depending on your team and city’s needs, other types of curb data can be collected. Right now, Coord Collector is built to ingest and catalog curb asset data including (but not limited to):
Yes. The Coord Collector iPhone app also allows you to easily collect curb space occupancy and turnover data. Collecting occupancy data digitally using Coord can dramatically reduce the level of back office data processing needed to prepare your data for analysis.
Each curb segment (single curb on one side of the street) takes on average 3-5 minutes to survey. We recommend that two people survey each curb. This increases accuracy and minimizes the chances of mistakes. To provide an example, a recent collection of 20 curb miles (approximately 5,000 vehicle lengths worth of space!) took 3 collectors about 1.5 work days, or 4.5 total person-days, to cover each curb twice, including issue resolution.
Working with Coord gives your team unlimited access to the Coord Collector app, so your team can collect as much data as you’d like at no additional cost. Collecting data also requires person-power, of course. To provide a sense of scale, a team of five people spent seven days and about 300 person-hours to collect about 100 detailed curb miles, including Coord’s recommended double-coverage of each curb, survey management, and issue resolution.
Some cities hire data collection firms, while others use their own staff or even interns to collect data.If you prefer, Coord can collect data on your behalf. Pricing depends on a few factors, including the size of the project area and the complexity of data integrations. Request a demo with us to discuss your goals and pricing.
In areas with highly demanded curbs (e.g., downtowns, nightlife areas, curbs near venues), capturing all of the assets that factor into a curb’s regulations can be difficult if not impossible with a car-based curb data collection method. Certain assets, such as curb cuts and curb paint, are commonly obstructed by vehicles.
With less than 2 hours of training, most people can collect about 8-10 curb miles per day (approximately 2,000 vehicle lengths worth of space) with the Coord Collector app. Vehicle-based methods can cover much more ground in a day, but vehicles may need to cover the same curb multiple times to get a complete view.
The Coord Collector app focuses on minimizing in-the-field data entry as well as removing the inaccuracy that can come from GPS-based surveying, especially in urban environments. Coord does not rely on GPS and instead uses augmented reality (AR) technology for measurement.
We’ve run a thorough head-to-head comparison of Coord to ArcGIS for curb data inventorying and translation; you can read our blog post about it here.
GPS typically has limited accuracy. The challenges can be particularly acute in urban areas, where the “urban canyon” effect can lead GPS-measured locations to be quite inaccurate. For this reason, Coord does not rely on GPS. Instead, we use augmented reality, which relies on the iPhone’s accelerometer, gyroscope, and camera, along with a human-verified “starting position” in the Coord Collector App, to determine location. This method of measurement is significantly more accurate than GPS, especially in urban environments.
Coord then standardizes sign data. This goes beyond the image and the text on the sign. It includes symbols, transcription, sign face, and importantly, linear referencing along the curb. By producing standardized sign data we make the asset information gathered from the street much more useful.
Once we have collected asset data, Coord’s rules engine translates the assets identified in the survey into the regulations on the street. Coord understands the sign text in the context of city and state codes, combines the signs with data from other sources, such as residential permit parking zones and parking meter rates and hours, and translates all of this data into viewable, analyzable regulations on a map.
Yes, Coord can produce data in CurbLR format upon request. However it may be helpful to understand your plans for your curb data to figure out what the best format is for your needs.
CurbLR is designed to be a standardized format for sharing curb regulation data (e.g., hours and days when loading is allowed) about a city's curbs with the public. While data produced in CurbLR format is standardized, it doesn’t necessarily mean it is compatible with your city’s existing software. Using CurbLR's data format requires the use of an OpenStreetMap-based linear referencing system, so the CurbLR data you produce may not be aligned with your city's base map. Exporting in CurbLR may not help you load your data in GIS, since CurbLR uses a nested data format to describe regulations.
Because Coord supports exporting different kinds of data export, we can work with you to make sure that your curb data is as useful as possible across all of your workflows and tools. This may involve using CurbLR, but it may not.
In the longer term, our goal is to work with cities and other companies to develop standardized formats for curb data that draw ideas from CurbLR and similar initiatives. Coord is a member of the steering committee of the Open Mobility Foundation’s Curb Management Working Group, which is using a city-led open governance model to develop curb data standards, and we have committed to adopting these standards once they are released.
The Coord Driver app currently supports drivers in cities that have established Smart Zones. Download the app for iPhone or Android and watch this short video to learn how the app works and how to use it to save you time on your next delivery!
Find more information on which cities have active Smart Zone programs and details on how you can get started here.
Our city partners use Smart Zone booking to identify ways to 1) make deliveries more efficient for drivers, 2) provide the right amount of loading space in the right locations, and 3) incentivize safe loading activities to make streets safer for pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers.
Saves drivers time: Smart Zones show drivers where legal space is available to save time routing to a location and allows for last-mile reservations. This will help your drivers save time getting to a location and be able to get to their next destination as quickly as possible.
Supports right-sized loading availability: Our city partners use Smart Zone data to identify areas in need of more loading space based on booking data and feedback from fleets and drivers. In one of our partner cities, the city expanded some of its loading zones based on the high booking demand from drivers during peak morning hours.
Promotes safety: Our city partners make safety a top priority and use Smart Zones to make sure fleets are incentivized to find safe, legal spaces to decrease safety hazards such as double-parking or parking too close to an intersection.
Find more information on which cities have active Smart Zone programs and details on how you can get your fleet onboard here.
The Coord API is a read-only service that describes what you can and cannot do along a curb in a given city. Specifically, the API lets you pass a variety of parameters related to criteria such as vehicle type, location, time of day, and expected duration of dwell and returns the corresponding rules along the curb or curbs, depending on the endpoint used, nearby.
We use a variety of data sources. This data includes the curb asset and regulation data Coord or our partners have collected using the Coord Collector app as well as dynamic feeds of city-provided asset data, parking rate tables, and movie set, parade and construction permits where available.
You can see our up-to-date coverage list on our coverage page. We are constantly looking to expand our coverage, so please reach out at partners@coord.com if you have a specific area you’d like to request coverage for.
Coord supports more than 20 cities today including NYC, Boston, Seattle, San Diego, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boulder, Austin, Washington DC, Miami, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Boston, Atlanta, Somerville, Vancouver, and Denver. To date, we have focused on the North American market, however, we are open to discussing working with interested cities and organizations from around the world. You can see our most up to date coverage on our coverage page and read more about what we offer on our city page.
For information on where we have active Smart Zone programs visit our fleet and delivery driver pages.
If you’re a city interested in working with Coord, reach out at partners@coord.com to discuss how we can work together.
Yes! Coord can be configured to accommodate the specific by-laws and regulations of any area.
While our focus has been the North American market, we are open to discussing localization opportunities in select markets.
We believe streets should serve people — not vehicles.
Coord was co-founded by Stephen Smyth and Jacob Baskin and the team includes urbanists and technologists. Coord closed its Series A funding round in September 2018 and is backed by Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs, Alliance Ventures, Trucks Venture Capital, Urban Us, and DB Digital Ventures.
The company was founded in July 2016.
Coord is based in New York City.
Oh no, we are sorry to hear that! Please reach out via support@coord.com so that we can address this as soon as possible! Thanks for helping us improve our products.
Our resolution time goal is one business day for all bugs.
Please reach out via support@coord.com and a Coord Product Specialist will assist.
If you are a fleet manager or driver in a Smart Zone city, you can reach out to the email above or submit your question via our fleet page for assistance.
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