The Enforcement Gap at the Curb

On October 1 the Urban Robotics Foundation hosted a panel on the curb, the most contested piece of real estate in a city.¹ The panelists were a transportation consultant who co-directs a university initiative on autonomous vehicles and cities, an Oslo-based mobility partner, a smart mobility official from the City of Austin, and a former New York City traffic commissioner.²

One disclosure first. The host, Bern Grush, runs the foundation. His company’s CurbReserver platform and XoomPark work together on private-property pick-up and drop-off. We know him, and you should know that when you read what follows.

Many ideas came up. One kept returning, and it is the one we want to write about.

A pick-up and drop-off rule is only as good as its enforcement.

Enforcement takes a person

The Austin official was direct. In her city, she said, enforcement takes a physical person. Austin does issue parking tickets to autonomous vehicles. But the city has talked about what a reservation system for pick-up and drop-off would look like and struggled with it, because surveillance technology is a hard sell in some places. She guessed that New York, with congestion pricing already in place, might find it easier. She called that speculation, and so do we.

California has taken a different step. A state law that began applying on July 1, 2026 lets police issue a notice of noncompliance to the company behind an autonomous vehicle. Reporting on it says the company must report each notice to the state, and that the law leaves open how repeated notices will count against a company’s permits.³ That is a real tool. It is also a tool that starts with an officer who sees a violation.

So the picture is uneven. Some cities have a person on the street. Some have a person and a new legal route. Some have neither the staff nor the political room for the cameras that would stand in for staff. A rule written for all of them will land very differently in each.

The curb is already spoken for

The former New York traffic commissioner made a second point. Nearly every inch of curb is already dedicated to something: restaurants, bus lanes, bike lanes, scooters and bikes. A new pick-up and drop-off zone has to take space from one of them.

He also told a story about what worked. New York set up a reservation arrangement for ride-hail at its airports, and in his telling it worked. He said nothing like it exists in Midtown. We could not find a current public description of the full arrangement. What we could confirm is narrower: at JFK, one ride-hail company tells its drivers to wait in designated staging lots and take requests through a virtual first-in, first-out queue, with a cap on how many vehicles can wait that changes with time of day and demand.⁴

Notice where that works. It works off the curb, in a lot, where someone controls entry. We think that is the lesson in the example, though it is our reading and not something the panel said.

Start with communication, fine last

The Oslo panelist described an order of operations we liked: communicate first, enforce behavior next, use fines last. A rule people can see and understand needs less policing.

That fits Barcelona’s multi-use lanes, where a lane serves buses at peak hours, loading between peaks and parking at night, with digital displays telling drivers which use applies.⁵ The panelist said double parking there reportedly disappeared. We could not confirm that result, so we are leaving it as her recollection and not a finding.

The same thread ran through the micromobility discussion. Where cities required a platform, data and two-way communication, they could reward good behavior and see who broke the rules. The Austin official added the other side of that: cities would love data sharing, and her own city does not know how many autonomous vehicles operate there, because state law does not require operators to say.

What private property can do

We think this is where private property helps, and also where it stops.

A private lot or garage sets its own access and its own rules. The owner decides who comes in, when, and for how long. Nobody needs a city camera or a city officer, because the gate and the agreement do the enforcing. The fleet pays the owner, so no city budget is involved. And each booked visit leaves a record, so there is data on who was there and when. That is what we build in XoomPark OS: we find and vet sites, agree each site’s terms, and keep the record of every booked visit.

It also fits a pattern we have written about before. Loading can stay at the curb, where the person is. Waiting can move onto property that has agreed to host it. We made that case in our post about trains and stations, and our post about what a property already has lists what a site usually needs.

The numbers point the same way. In a San Francisco simulation of 1,700 shared vehicles, banning curb staging raised daily fleet travel by nearly 60%.⁶ A ban only works if somewhere else exists to wait.

What it cannot do

Private property covers only the places where a property exists and an owner has said yes. It does not touch the public curb, and the public curb belongs to cities. It does not fix the last 50 feet to a door. It does not settle what counts as safe, how many vehicles a city should allow, or what happens to jobs.

And supply is not yet easy to read. In our Miami list of 1,606 sites, none records a gate type, and 189 list a clearance. Until that data exists, a fleet cannot tell which sites will take it.

Enforcement of the public curb still belongs to cities. Private sites can take part of the load off it. They cannot replace it.

Where this leaves us

Our takeaway is modest. If a city cannot enforce a pick-up and drop-off rule, it should be careful about writing one it cannot back up. And wherever a private owner can host the waiting, it is worth asking whether the rule needs to reach that far at all. Our page on pick-up and drop-off for fleets describes how we approach it.

For a city or a property owner, the starting question is not, “How do we police the curb?”

It is:

“Which parts of this can an owner control, and which parts only a city can?”

Rules need enforcement. Start where enforcement already exists.