Putting People First in Transportation Planning
Q&A with Tiffany Chu, CEO Remix
This profile of Remix and its co-founder and CEO, Tiffany Chu, is the second in a series that shares the journeys of entrepreneurs who are building health into everyday life, creating new products and services that shape the environments around us and make healthier lives easier to realize.
Remix is a collaborative mapping platform for transportation decision-making, helping cities plan public transit, design safer streets, and manage shared mobility services. Planners can use the software to rapidly envision and analyze multiple options — calculating potential impacts on access to jobs, pedestrian safety, time to destinations, equity and more.
Remix got their start as a grassroots civic project for residents of San Francisco to suggest better transit routes to the city. It went viral on the internet, and soon over 200 planners from around the world were emailing them to say, “I love what you built — can I use it for my actual transportation plan in my community?”
While Remix offers planners tools to evaluate all modes of transportation, they are also clear on their values — emphasizing humans over vehicles and removing some of the historical biases against supporting walking, cycling and public transportation options. We’re interested in what they’re doing because giving cities the tools to make their streets more friendly to active transportation modes can ultimately lead to healthier residents. It’s also a great example of multisolving — where solutions motivated by one challenge have benefits across multiple areas of interest. Tiffany’s core motivations are climate change and social justice. She points out that transportation is the single largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, and your commute time is the single largest factor in your ability to move up the economic ladder.
Susan Williams talked with Tiffany about how Remix works with its customers and embeds its values in its services. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Susan Williams: I’m interested in the idea of intentionality in your platform. How have you built this into your work?
Tiffany Chu: We’re shifting from the standard model of urban planning and transportation engineering that is based on the automobile. Remix centers our design perspective on humans. What is the best solution for the most number of people, and not just the most privileged? How should movement through the city be experienced from their perspective? So we’re moving to human-centered design as opposed to automobile-centric.
Tech can’t save us all but what it can do is lower the barrier for more people to access tools, better understand projects, and consider how to build for a more diverse set of stakeholders. Remix is creating technology that can help people imagine different possible futures, knowing that whenever you design tech there’s inherently a point of view. There are power dynamics and hierarchies, so how you choose to visualize things is always going to reflect pretty strong opinions. We’re never going to tell people what they should do, because software is. We’re never going to know better about what your community needs than you.
Susan Williams: Does Remix propose solutions or perspectives to its clients?
Tiffany Chu: The appropriate role for Remix is being able to nudge people to consider increased access and equity in ways they may not have seen before. We’ve also built a feature into our platform that evaluates whether a transit service disproportionately impacts minority or lower-income populations. We built a census breakdown table feature that allows practitioners to effectively evaluate equity first, as opposed to equity as an afterthought.
Susan Williams: Is that equity analysis an automatic part of the software?
Tiffany Chu: Depending on what the city is trying to accomplish, we can turn equity analysis on for our customers.
Susan Williams: What are you doing to think about public health, in particular?
Tiffany Chu: One of the things we’re thinking about is how to show what sustainable modes of transportation truly look like. We’re trying to nudge people to think about people first — and that includes their health and wellbeing. With COVID, we’ve added street elements to showcase how to design urban spaces for social distancing — for example, how people can use the street with a six foot radius around them.
Susan Williams: How do you see your work as changing mindsets?
Tiffany Chu: The way things are built right now is based on a set of outdated series of automobile-centered highway standards. The most important thing those standards prioritize is how to move vehicles as quickly as possible through intersections. If we center design on humans first, we’re opening people’s minds to different possibilities in how we build health into the layout of our urban architecture.
Remix gives cities the tools to envision and plan for more sustainable, healthier approaches to transportation and mobility, but the lack of sustainable funding for transportation remains a headwind. Tiffany warns: “transit agencies in the US are about to fall off a fiscal cliff due to COVID if the federal government doesn’t pass a stimulus bill that includes transit. There has always been an abhorrently unbalanced ratio of highway funding vs. transit / active transportation (walking, bicycling, etc.) funding, and that needs to change if we want to address climate change in a significant way.”
It’s a reminder of the need for tech innovation to co-evolve with public policy and public infrastructure if we are to reverse decades-long patterns.
