Founding Charter of the Curb Institute

Our Conviction

The public space between buildings and the roadway — the sidewalk, the curbside, or “curb” — is one of the most strategic, yet still one of the least understood and least structured components of urban planning.

Parking, deliveries, passenger pick-up and drop-off, public transport, bicycles, new mobility services, outdoor terraces, urban services, accessibility: the uses of the curb are multiplying and increasingly competing with one another.

Yet curb management remains highly fragmented across different municipal departments and public-sector stakeholders, with dispersed responsibilities, insufficient data, and practices that are still often based on experience and intuition rather than on shared methodologies.

This has very tangible consequences. Poor curb allocation contributes to congestion, slows down mobility and logistics operations, increases emissions, makes the sharing of public space more difficult, and can undermine street safety.

We believe that better curb management can, conversely, become a powerful lever for improving mobility and urban quality of life.

To achieve this, the curb must progressively become a field of knowledge, governance and management in its own right.

This is the purpose of the Curb Institute.

Our Mission

The Curb Institute is an independent, neutral and non-partisan think tank dedicated to advancing the understanding and professionalisation of curb management.

Its mission is to help establish curb management as a discipline in its own right by developing and disseminating the knowledge that decision-makers need to better understand, measure, organise and manage the curbside.

The Curb Institute aims to become an international hub for knowledge and best practices in this field: a place where local authorities, researchers, experts, mobility professionals and private-sector stakeholders can access, share and develop useful knowledge.

The Institute does not advocate for a single model of curb organisation. Its objective is to equip decision-makers to make better-informed choices, tailored to the specific characteristics of their territories and grounded, wherever possible, in data, research and practical experience.

Our Objectives

The Curb Institute’s work is structured around four objectives.

1. 1. Establish the curb as a strategic urban issue.
   Contribute to bringing curb management into the wider debate on mobility and public space, foster a better understanding of its role in the functioning of cities, and help inform urban planning and design decisions.

2. 2. Structure knowledge and make it accessible.
   Identify, gather and organise existing research, data, experiences and best practices across different territories in order to build a knowledge base that is accessible to decision-makers and practitioners.

3. 3. Advance professional practices.
   Support the development of methods, indicators and reference frameworks that enable a shift from largely intuitive or fragmented management towards approaches that are more structured, measurable and data-informed.

4. 4. Build an international community.
   Connect the people and organisations working on these issues — local authorities, researchers, engineers, urban planners, mobility operators, companies and experts — in order to encourage the sharing of experience and the creation of new knowledge.

Our Principles of Action

Independence and Neutrality

The Curb Institute is independent and non-partisan. It does not represent any company, technology, or particular model of mobility or public-space management.

It is committed to presenting issues, solutions and their limitations in an objective and pluralistic manner. Its work should be useful to local authorities and stakeholders operating in different contexts, facing different constraints and pursuing different policy priorities.

Rigour and Transparency

The Curb Institute’s work is intended to draw on the best available knowledge: academic research, documented public or private data, practical feedback and field expertise.

The sources, assumptions and methodologies used should be explicit. Where knowledge is uncertain, incomplete or subject to debate, that uncertainty should be acknowledged.

The Primacy of the Public Interest

The Curb Institute believes that curb management should above all serve the public interest: ensuring equitable access to the city, protecting safety and accessibility, supporting economic and social vitality, contributing to the environmental transition, and sustainably improving quality of life.

The Curb Institute therefore considers curb management not merely as a parking issue, but as a discipline that enables more informed trade-offs between competing uses of public space.

Openness and Plurality

The Curb Institute aims to bring together a diversity of expertise and perspectives.

Knowledge about the curb cannot be produced by a single category of stakeholder. It should involve public decision-makers, researchers, practitioners, economic actors, and specialists in mobility and public space.

The Institute promotes constructive dialogue between different experiences and approaches, within a framework of respect, neutrality and a shared commitment to finding solutions.

A Data- and Experimentation-Driven Approach

We believe that improving curb management requires a better understanding of available space, the rules governing it, its actual uses and the impacts of those uses.

The Curb Institute therefore encourages the production and sharing of data, the development of common indicators, local experimentation and the evaluation of implemented policies.

The objective is not to seek a universal solution, but to enable cities to learn more quickly from their own experiences and from those of others.

Our Commitments

To fulfil its mission, the Curb Institute is committed to producing and disseminating useful and accessible resources: mapping existing knowledge, publications and research, case studies, reference frameworks, directories of experts, exchanges with practitioners, and authoritative publications.

It will seek to connect existing work rather than duplicate it, to increase the visibility of relevant initiatives, and to identify areas where further research is needed.

Experts, institutions and partners contributing to the Institute’s work are invited to uphold the principles of this Charter: intellectual independence, transparency, rigour, plurality of perspectives, and commitment to the public interest.

Our Ambition

Our ambition is simple: to make the curb better understood so that it can be better managed.

As the uses of streets continue to evolve, cities need new tools, new knowledge and appropriate governance frameworks. By helping to establish curb management as a discipline in its own right, the Curb Institute aims to enable decision-makers to transform an area that is too often managed through a succession of constraints into a genuine lever for mobility, safety, urban efficiency and quality of life.

The Curb Institute seeks to build this knowledge in an open, international and collaborative way.