By Katherine Beaty

Walking up to almost any urban curb, you’ll find a policy masterpiece. Time restrictions, zone designations, loading windows, permit requirements, rideshare staging areas, all technically accurate, legally defensible, and posted at regular height and intervals. A lot of care went into getting those rules right.

And yet drivers still park wrong. Every day, everywhere.

When I am working with clients on operational reviews, this is one of the first places I look, not because the rules are bad, but because something is getting lost between policy and the pavement (or in this case, the curb). The instinct is usually to reach for more enforcement, better signage, or smarter technology. Those aren’t wrong answers. But they all assume that non-compliance is mostly a knowledge problem. Get the information in front of the people clearly enough, enforce consequences consistently enough, and behavior follows. 

In my experience, it’s rarely that simple.

The curb isn’t where rules live. It is where decisions happen. And those are very different things to design for.

Present bias on display

Behavioral economics calls it present bias, our very human tendency to overweight what’s immediately in front of us against consequences that feel distant or abstract. At the curb, present bias is clearly on display. 

I see the same thing happen with rideshare drivers circling for a pickup, for parents on school drop-off, for anyone who has ever turned a “just a minute” into a 20-minute double-park. The rules were right. The moment of decision was completely undesigned. 

Curb management technology has made this more complicated, not less. Cities now have the capability to apply dynamic pricing by time of day, apply zone designations that shift by the hour, and use real-time availability displays. For planners, that’s powerful. For the driver trying to make a split-second decision while someone is honking behind them, it’s a lot to analyze.

Reframe the question

Barry Schwartz wrote about this in “The Paradox of Choice,” a book I keep coming back to in this work. More options and more information don’t reliably produce better decisions. Rather, they produce avoidance, shortcuts, and errors. When under pressure in the moment, drivers make decisions requiring the least immediate effort. That’s usually not what the policy intended. 

The sensors work. The license plate recognition cameras work. Pricing is live. The app is functional. What is missing is the design for the moment of choice itself. 

When I work through this scenario with clients, I try to reframe the question. Instead of asking what the driver needs to know, start asking what the driver needs to decide, and how do we make the right choice the easiest one? 

Sometimes the answers are surprisingly low-tech: physical demarcation that makes the zone boundaries obvious without requiring sign-reading, loading zones positioned closer to where the demand actually concentrates, and enforcement patterns consistent enough to feel real rather than arbitrary enough to be ignored. 

It also means being honest about when non-compliance is rational rather than ignorant. If your rideshare pickup zone requires a three-block detour from where the passengers actually exit a venue, drivers aren’t being defiant; they’re solving a problem the policy created. That’s useful information. The fix usually isn’t a bigger fine. It’s a better zone. 

Make the rules easier to follow

What I’ve found, again and again, is that the operations making the biggest gains in compliance aren’t the ones with the toughest enforcement. They’re the ones that made following the rules easier than breaking them. That’s a different problem to solve and a more solvable one. 

That shift doesn’t require a major technology investment. It starts with standing at your curb, watching what people actually do, and then asking why? The answers are usually right there, three seconds at a time. 

KATHERINE BEATY is the CEO and president of Beaty Solutions. She can be reached at [email protected].