Coming To A Street Near You: Help Remix Create a New Tool for Street Designers

Vibrant cities rely on the seamless connectivity of people and ideas. Streets enable these connections: your city’s community members need good streets to access jobs, move safely and sustainably, and live well.

Here at Remix, we’re excited to pilot a new product to design city streets.

We’re designing it on top of the new data standard called SharedStreets, which is being developed by the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) and the Open Transport Partnership. We need your input to help us build the right thing! 🎉

In his seminal book The Image of the City (1960), American urban planner Kevin Lynch placed streets and paths at the start of our understanding of cities in a list of five elements: streets, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks.

Why we’re doing it

For planners, transportation engineers, and urban designers, streets are the raw networks that help residents move. To support a complete set of transportation modes and eliminate pedestrian fatalities, pedestrian, bicycle, vehicle, and freight movement data is crucial. But there’s no shared platform to capture data findings, analyze them, and collaborate on solutions. Why is that the case?

Turns out, there are three main challenges standing in the way…which we actually prefer to think of as opportunities.

Opportunity 1: The Complete Picture Is Hard To Find

Today, there’s more data than ever describing movement, collisions, curb pickup locations — but it’s often just out of reach for planners. Maybe it’s only available from commercial providers in a format more accessible to academics than planners. Private companies may be reluctant to share their data at all because it’s proprietary or incompatible.

We’ve talked to numerous urban planners about their data challenges. In King County, Washington, transit planner Daniel Rowe shared that he regularly struggles with the problem of matching city streets between datasets.

“There’s no GTFS for street data currently” said Rowe, referring to the successful General Transit Feed Specification pioneered by Portland TriMet’s Bibiana McHugh with Google Maps 13 years ago.

With reliable access to emerging sources of urban data, many say they’d do better work. What if different sources could connect to an underlying network, putting activities on streets in useful context? What if you could visually see, share, and update complete data about the segments in your city’s entire street network?

Using SharedStreets for linear referencing of segments to bring together a more complete picture of existing conditions.

Opportunity 2: Cities Lack A Reliable Streets Database

Cities are often hampered by a fragmented, piecemeal approach to understanding current infrastructure. Some general observations:

1. Facts about as-built conditions may be scattered across files, databases, email threads — thus hard to find, collate, and visualize for audiences.
2. Data that does exist is often not portable between applications, locked into specific vendors, simulations, or use cases, when the data could be useful for more than one purpose.
3. Re-surveying streets and asking neighboring departments for planning updates are common causes of wasted time and energy.
4. Shared data sources like OpenStreetMap, the wiki world map started by volunteer mappers in 2004, are promising but often don’t precisely match official sources and omit data needed for applications like curb inventory.
5. Meanwhile, popular special-purpose planning tools like our friends at Streetmix have inspired the field and opened up the possibility of high-quality urban design to new communities.

We’ve talked to planners about the common lack of a shared repository of street facts. Sarah Fine, a planner in Oakland CA, uses Streetmix when brainstorming new lane configuration concepts. It can be challenging and resource-intensive to build cross sections up to a fully laid-out corridor plan complete with curb-to-curb dimensions.

What if you could connect all these sources into a new shared platform so that everyone can benefit from the same understanding of the built environment?

Imagine if you could start “editing” a street right away — on top of a shared understanding of the built environment

Opportunity 3: Few Tools Represent Street Networks

Streets in a city are a network: residents rarely experience a single street segment in isolation. GIS tools typically record where streets and assets are located, but not how they’re connected. Useful network data includes movement through intersections, parking space inventory and meter income along segments, and the impact of changes to neighboring streets.

We are excited about NACTO’s plans to repeat the success of GTFS with SharedStreets, especially the goal of “a digital commons for streets” acting as “a launchpad for public-private collaboration and data exchange … through a non-proprietary system for describing streets.”

It paints a compelling picture of a new platform for planning complete street networks — for the benefit of all users.

When approaching streets with network data (such as movement counts), it opens up opportunities by taking advantage of all of the assets in an area as compared to a single corridor. Creative solutions around issues such as lane capacity, modal priority, and parking supply are easier to find when evaluating at the network level.

Try Me ✋🏼

We’re looking for cities of all shapes and sizes to collaborate with as we build this new product. If you’re interested, get in touch here!