Beyond One Vendor - Part 1: The Curb Is Infrastructure; Your Vendor Structure Should Be Too

For most of the past century, parking management was treated like a utility. Meters required maintenance. Citations needed issuing. Notices needed mailing. Permits needed approval.

The work mattered, but it was largely procedural. Parking programs were mechanical systems designed to maintain a basic level of service. In that environment, the logic of hiring a single vendor to “handle parking” made sense. One contract, one operator, one accountable party responsible for keeping the machinery running. If something broke, you knew who to call.

For a long time, that structure worked well. But a change in thinking occurred over the last decade, and parking became something more than machinery.

When the Curb Became Infrastructure

The curb is now one of the most dynamic pieces of public infrastructure, shaping mobility patterns, influencing safety outcomes, and generating municipal revenue that funds critical public services. It produces data that informs policy decisions about equity, congestion, and urban design.

A city evaluating its curb system today is no longer simply asking whether meters are functioning. It is asking deeper questions:

• Is enforcement predictable and proportional?

• How do we best optimize enforcement schedules?

• Does enforcement reinforce existing inequities?

• Are parking meters properly priced and demand understood?

• Does the collections strategy protect the time value of municipal revenue?

• Do enforcement practices disproportionately affect certain neighborhoods?

• Can data help prevent safety incidents before they occur?

• How should scarce curb space be allocated across competing needs — delivery, transit, accessibility, residents, and commercial activity?

• How can agencies identify and engage the right stakeholders?

• How can curb allocation evolve as travel patterns, land use, and technology change?

These are not mechanical questions. They are systems questions. And systems questions reveal something important: properly managing the curb means treating it as infrastructure.

Infrastructure systems behave differently than procedural services. They require multiple forms of expertise operating simultaneously such as, operations, analytics, technology architecture, policy design, financial modeling, and governance. When systems become complex, the once-accepted principle of generalism shows its limitations.

The Challenge of the Modern “Full-Service” Model

There is an old phrase: “Jack of all trades, master of none.” In simple service environments, capable generalists perform very well. In practice, this means the modern “full‑service” model now spans a wide range of distinct and highly specialized disciplines, exceeding the demands of any single vendor. The challenge is not whether vendors are capable — it is whether any single organization can realistically sustain deep expertise across an expanding set of highly specialized disciplines.

When too many these functions sit within a single company, the challenge is rarely incompetence. Most large vendors employ talented professionals across many disciplines. The issue is structural rather than individual. Depth in one discipline must compete with priorities in another. Expertise becomes stretched. Leadership attention divides. The shared P&L that makes vertical integration look efficient on paper is precisely what makes sustained investment in any single discipline so difficult to defend. The more disciplines involved, the harder it becomes for any organization to maintain deep mastery in all of them simultaneously.

The Answer Isn’t More Consolidation — Or Pure Specialization

At this point, cities face an apparent dilemma.

Consolidation creates dilution. But a loosely assembled collection of pure specialists creates its own problem: coordination friction and diffuse accountability. Each partner may be expert in their domain. Without unified oversight, however, the city becomes the de facto general contractor. It takes on the responsibility for integration, conflict resolution, and strategic coherence across vendors who have no structural reason to collaborate.

Neither the generalist or specialist model fully answers the question cities are actually asking, which is not “How do we get more services from fewer vendors?” It is: “How do we make complex infrastructure perform?”

Those are different questions. And the answer to the second one requires a different kind of expertise than either model provides.

Leadership scholar Warren Bennis identified something important about how complex systems are best served. The people who create the most value in sophisticated environments are not pure specialists, and they are not shallow generalists. They are deep generalists, professionals who have developed genuine mastery in specific domains while also building the breadth to understand how those domains interact, where they create tension, and how to integrate them toward outcomes.

Deep generalists are not the ones doing all the specialized work. They are the ones who understand it well enough to govern it, challenge it, and connect it to what clients actually care about. That distinction matters structurally, not just personally.

A Three-Layer Architecture for Complex Curb Systems

The model that best serves modern curb infrastructure is not a single vendor and not a loose consortium. It is a structured ecosystem with three distinct layers, each serving a different function.

• Layer One: Specialized Execution Partners. These are the organizations that go deep in a single discipline. This can include citation issuance, loading zone management, payment apps, computer vision, meter manufacturers, stakeholder engagement, technology platforms, etc. Their value comes from focus. Years of iteration within a narrow domain produce proprietary methods, embedded institutional knowledge, and performance capabilities that generalists cannot replicate. Each partner’s accountability is direct: their results stand alone and can be benchmarked independently.

• Layer Two: Ecosystem Governance. Specialized partners need a coordinating structure, one that sets performance standards, maintains data independence, ensures interoperability, and preserves competitive tension between providers. This layer keeps the ecosystem from becoming a fragmented collection of siloed vendors. It is where strategic coherence lives, and where the city’s leverage is protected: modular design means underperformance can be addressed by adjusting scope rather than dismantling an entire contract.

• Layer Three: The Deep Generalist Advisor. This is the layer that makes the ecosystem perform as a system rather than as a collection of parts. The deep generalist advisor understands each specialized discipline well enough to integrate them, translate their outputs into policy and outcome language, and serve as the city’s strategic partner across the contract term. This is more than a relationship manager. It is a professional who can tell a city when their collections strategy is undermining their equity goals, when their enforcement schedule is leaving revenue on the table, or when their technology vendor is building toward lock-in , and who has the credibility and structural independence to say so.
  

Structure Is a Governance Choice

At its core, the debate about vendor structure is not really about vendors. It is about governance, and about what kind of expertise you want at the center of it.

Administrative simplicity will always make consolidation attractive. Managing one contract is easier than managing several. But simplicity does not always equate to strength.

The curb is infrastructure. It shapes mobility, influences safety, informs policy, and funds public services, all while evolving dynamically with technology and city goals. Infrastructure demands mastery across multiple disciplines. It requires that mastery to be stable, transparent, and accountable over long periods of time. And it requires someone at the center who is deep enough in each discipline to govern the whole.

The future of curb management will not belong to the vendor that can do everything adequately. It will belong to ecosystems led by deep generalists, systems where each discipline performs exceptionally, within governance structures that preserve independence, transparency, and long-term adaptability.

To learn more about how Trellint works with cities and partners to support the product ecosystem, contact Trellint or explore our perspective on complex curb management.

UP NEXT

Part 2: The Accountability Gap: why the structure of a vendor relationship determines whether you can trust the advice you’re getting.