Curbs are perhaps the most underrated part of urban infrastructure. Mostly, you just step over them or walk alongside them. Only rarely do they register, except perhaps when you’re trying to navigate a suitcase, a stroller, or a wheelchair over them.

But for the Sidewalk Labs-backed urban mobility company Coord, they’re a pretty big deal. Coord is a developer platform for the mobility market, says Coord CEO Stephen Smyth–it builds tools to help ride-share and bike-share companies work better by streamlining payments and user logins across apps, for instance.

And as they were building out the platform, “we recognized that curbs were this really interesting physical thing in the world,” Smyth says. “But by and large, they have not been digitized.” Or, if cities have digitized information about their curbs, they haven’t made that information available to the public.

While ubiquitous and not exactly sexy, curbs serve a variety of functions that will only continue to diversify as automated vehicles hit the mainstream market. Curbs are where ride-hailing companies like Uber deposit their passengers, and they frequently play host to bike shares, dockless and docked alike. They also are where urban freight companies do their loading and unloading and, of course, they’re where drivers search for parking.

Having a digital tool that maps out, in great detail, how curb spaces can be used across a city would allow all street users to better understand how to use this infrastructure, and will form the backbone of crucial data that programmers can feed to autonomous vehicles so they can understand not only how to navigate streets, but also how and when and where they can pull over and use the curbs.

To create that tool, which Coord named its Curbs API, “we took information from city sources–New York and Seattle, for instance, have an open-data platform where anyone can access this kind of data–and aggregated that information,” Smyth says.

For cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles, that do not have an open-data platform, Coord built a smartphone app that uses augmented reality to analyze photos of curb features taken by their team of surveyors.