At a glance
Who: City of Boston Emerging Technologies Office. street cabinet. Innovation and Technology Cabinet. Parking Superintendent’s Office; New Mobility Office; Citywide Analytics Team.
what: The City of Boston established the Boston Curve Lab to create and maintain a real-time digital understanding of parking regulations and build tools to help residents navigate parking lots.
why: This will enable city planners, transportation experts, and policy makers to balance competing demands for curb space for years to come.
when: This effort is a continuation of an ongoing curb modernization program in Boston.
The City of Boston’s Office of Emerging Technology established the Boston Curve (Curve) Lab to create and maintain a real-time digital understanding of parking enforcement and build tools to help residents navigate parking spaces.
The new Curb Lab, powered by modern data tools and artificial intelligence (AI), will help city planners, transportation experts, and policy makers balance competing demands for curb space for years to come. Project work has already been used to develop reliable tow zone alerts, track food delivery congestion and safety, and build public maps to improve parking access.
Parking regulation map throughout the city
According to the city, effectively managing curb space requires more than new signage and policy changes. Modern advances in artificial intelligence and data tools have enabled a dynamic approach that can transform 400 years of parking code and historical information into a city-wide parking code map.
This new publicly accessible database allows residents to quickly and reliably answer “Can I park here?” This effort to modernize city operations, aligned with long-term initiatives like Go Boston 2030 and Vision Zero, represents an important step toward a broader vision for how people experience and perceive cities.
“For more than 40 years, our curve data has existed in disconnected systems that don’t communicate with each other. [kerb lab’s] Leaders, we can finally link these systems together. ”
“Every time a delivery truck makes a turn toward a loading zone, it creates congestion and emissions. Unclear signage and processes all create unnecessary confusion and safety risks,” said Michael Lawrence Evans, director of the Office of Emerging Technologies.
“These issues impact how people move, how businesses operate, and the quality of life in our neighborhoods. Curve Lab is our answer to that challenge.”
This effort continues ongoing curb modernization work in the City of Boston, funded by a U.S. Department of Transportation SMART grant awarded in 2024. The lab includes partners from across the city of Boston, including the Streets Cabinet, the Innovation and Technology Cabinet, the Parking Dept., the Office of New Mobility, and the citywide analytics team.
These teams are leveraging this digital inventory to build systems and leverage data to reduce costs, adjust control decisions, and improve efficiency over time.
“Boston is setting the standard for how cities manage curb space in the 21st century.”
“For more than 40 years, our curbside data has existed in disconnected systems that don’t communicate with each other,” said Amelia Capone, Parking Authority Director of Parking and Curb Management. ” [lab’s] Thanks to leadership, we are finally able to link these systems together. This means less duplication of effort, faster response times to constituent requests, better internal coordination, and directly improved traffic flow and safety on our streets. ”
City Permit Tool
Curb Lab uses the Curb Data Specification (CDS), an open standard developed by the Open Mobility Foundation. CDS makes information about parking rules, loading zones, time limits, and other curbside regulations available to residents and businesses in the systems they already use: mapping apps, delivery platforms, and city permitting tools. This means other cities can adopt Boston’s approach without having to build everything from scratch.
“Boston is setting the standard for how cities manage curb space in the 21st century,” said Andrew Glass Hastings, executive director of the Open Mobility Foundation. “As members of OMF’s Smart Curb Collaborative, they are fully embracing this challenge and are the first to use CDS to build and deploy these tools at scale. They are also making them broadly accessible so other cities can follow. What Boston is doing today, cities across the country will be able to do tomorrow.”
