Optimizing Curb Space Management through Dynamic Pricing

With the growth of new mobility services and increased needs for goods delivery, curb spaces, and their use have evolved very rapidly. Especially after COVID-19, active travel has increased, and delivery rates have skyrocketed, which has created a great need to ensure safe and efficient management of the curbs. One way to manage the curb spaces is to implement smart pricing strategies, as they can help manage the demand efficiently. To this end, we have built a dynamic pricing model by considering different curb uses. More specifically, we developed a discrete-time Markov decision process model (MDP) in which the objective is the maximization of the expected revenue of cities from all curb space uses. By using our model, we also derived easy-to-implement policies that can be used in curb pricing decisions.