We created the ISO Standard – We are working with cities around the globe preparing for robots on sidewalks, bike lanes and roads.

In today’s cities, curb and sidewalk space is under increasing pressure for access by a growing variety of uses, innovations, devices, businesses, and services.

The past decade has seen rapid growth in active transportation adding cycling lanes at the curb, as well as scooter and bike storage on the sidewalk. In addition, the rise in goods delivery from e-commerce has been dramatic and has already reached unsustainable portions in many areas of some cities.  COVID-19 has added even more flexibility demands to the sidewalk and curb.

The next decade will see something even more ominous — the delivery of people to the curb using robotaxis and the delivery of goods via sidewalk-drones. This will not merely be a new increase in traffic volume necessitating better management, but a change in the nature of the interaction of mobility systems with each other, with the curb, with payment systems, with us humans, and with our existing manual vehicles and devices.

The traffic and parking rules we currently rely on — governance already under duress — will not support these new, automated systems. Cities will need new operating guidelines as our sidewalks and curbs are joined by automated taxis and delivery bots that will arrive, stop, park, wait and load under sensor, effector, and software control. Often unaccompanied by human passengers or attendants, these machines will need to be prioritized, scheduled, queued, bumped, and requeued regardless of the presence of human oversight, and all without blocking crosswalks, bicycle lanes, no-stopping areas, or transit stops.

Bern Grush of Harmonize Mobility is the project leader for ISO/4448 draft technical standard — a new standards project to address this. The ISO/4448 project, launched in April 2020, is being developed under the auspices of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The stakeholders for this new standard are accessibility advocates, City or Regional Governments, Logistics Firms, OEM and Tier 1 Automobile Manufacturers, Sidewalk-drone makers and Micromobility Operators, Taxi, Ridehailing, Microtransit operators, and Urban Planners.

For more details on this project click here.

For detailed Q&A on this project click here.

View our ongoing webinar series below!