A Tuesday at the Curb
It is 8:47 a.m. on Mission Street. A FedEx van is hazarding. A scooter is on the sidewalk. A ride-hail SUV is straddling a bus stop. A delivery cyclist is weaving between two of them. A parking enforcement officer is writing a ticket nobody will pay on time.
This eight-foot strip of asphalt has, in the last fifteen years, become the most contested square footage in the American city. It was designed for parked sedans. It now has to absorb e-commerce, micromobility, ride-hail, autonomous trials, food delivery, and the occasional human. The signs nailed to the pole are still wood, paint, and 1962 thinking. Populus showed up to fix the software.
Populus is a San Francisco company that builds the platform cities use to manage their curbs, their parking, and the unruly fleets of vehicles that orbit both. The pitch is unfussy: digitize the regulations, measure the demand, price the access, settle the bills. Cities buy a subscription. Populus runs the cloud.
The company was founded in 2017 by Dr. Regina Clewlow and Dr. Fletcher Foti, two transportation researchers who finished their PhDs (MIT and UC Berkeley) and decided the most useful thing they could do with them was build a B2G SaaS. This is unusual. Most transportation PhDs end up writing reports nobody reads. Clewlow and Foti decided to ship product instead.
By 2026, that product runs in more than 100 cities. The roster reads like a transit-nerd travel itinerary: San Francisco's MTA, the Chicago Department of Transportation, Oakland, Miami, Santa Monica, Hoboken, New York City, Milan, Budapest. None of these places agree on much. They all agree the curb is broken. They all bought Populus.