The curb is the city

Nia’s flour van cannot stop. Three cars with no one in them wait at her curb. That is the job this lesson is about.

The curb is the strip of street next to the sidewalk. Buses pull in. Vans unload. People get out. For a long time the rest of a car’s life was a parking stall: a rectangle the car owned all day, somewhere else.

A car that can drive itself changes that. It needs a drop-off: a few seconds at the curb, like a school drop-off. Then it leaves, or it waits, or it drives away empty. Every one of those choices lands on the same strip of street the bakery van needs.

Across the river the city painted a loop for the cameras. Quay Street, where people buy bread, got no drop-off, no wait rule, and a no-stopping sign nobody enforces.

The tempting mistake is to treat the car as the invention and assume the street will sort itself out.

That is what lets you ask who this street is for.