Managing the Curb: Alphabet Has A Company For That (GOOG)

A quick note on spelling. Whether I used "kerb" or "curb" half our readers would have to do a quick mental translation of the headline and since readers have a hard-enough time understanding what I'm trying to say it was decided that I should use British spelling earlier in the day and American spelling later, We've called in McKinsey to consult on what we should do for the Australians.

From Freightwaves via Benzinga:

Coord Is Digitizing Curb Spaces To Increase Its Utilization

Cities across the world are grappling with the rise of population density within their boundaries, and with the subsequent overflow onto streets, which can lead to worsening air quality and frequently occurring traffic jams. To improve the situation, it is essential for cities to promote cleaner forms of transport or alternatively, shared mobility.

"We are now living in an era of on-demand mobility – with ride-hailing, package delivery, food delivery, electric scooter sharing and even autonomous vehicles around the corner. And the streets are broken, as we see piles of scooters on sidewalks, traffic jams of on-demand taxis on the curbside, delivery vehicles that block buses and the like," said Stephen Smyth, the CEO of Coord, a startup that provides a way to analyze, share and collect curb data.

Coord started as a project within Alphabet Inc.'s Sidewalk Labs and spun out to establish an independent technology company that aims to dynamically deal with chaotic street spaces by digitizing curbs. "Cities still use old-fashioned and legacy ways to handle these issues, putting up static signs on top of a bunch of other signs, which eventually creates confusion," said Smyth. "We see it is imperative for the sustainability of cities to actually digitize their curbs, so that they can become more predictable and usable."

Smyth termed it as the know-before-you-go process – wherein instead of punching in the address of the place on the GPS, driving up the location and then searching for a curb space to park, users can identify online if there's a curb space available around the corner or further down the street, before actually driving to the place. "This makes curb space utilization more predictable and thus improves efficiency by reducing confusion amongst the public," said Smyth.

Digitizing curb spaces makes its utilization dynamic, which allows road authorities to switch curbs into parking spaces and create zones, all in real-time. For instance, curbs can be converted into a scooter parking zone on a game day, and parking prices can be dynamically changed based on traffic movement around the region. This makes curbs more productive, as dynamism maximizes the number of people using the curb, per unit time and unit length.

"Cities are increasingly seeing the curb as a gateway to the city. It is becoming a place not just to park a vehicle, but a place where people get out of a vehicle and where vehicles load or unload cargo. It is more like a point of embarkment for a city," said Smyth. "We see the curb as a tremendously undervalued space that is being managed with dated approaches. It is time for us to move into the digital curb system."...

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I'm beginning to believe that the thinking behind Google's Alphabet's  corporate naming strategy is to make mentioning them so awkward—Coord, really?—that people just stop talking about them and they are free to go on their merry way to world domination.

I do like Waymo—as in "Kids should have waymo autonomy"—though.