Here we are: 2021

Now that we’re here, let’s take a moment to reflect on what we’ve learned and celebrate what inspired us in the past year.

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2020 was an extraordinary year. The world was tasked with curbing a global pandemic, tackling worsening climate emergencies, and joining a movement to address growing racial and economic disparities.  Through it all, our customers were at the frontlines.

Transit agency customers responded quickly to the emerging needs of the COVID-19 crisis.

Woodlawn transit screenshot

For the first time in its history, New York MTA shut down overnight subway service and implemented unprecedented levels of overnight bus service to minimize disruption for essential workers.

For the new overnight service, they designed and implemented a system that added 344 more buses (a 146% increase from their previous service).

SFMTA bus interior

With massive drops in ridership and sudden decreases in bus operators, transit agencies like SFMTA (San Francisco) had to make the hard decision to scale back transit service.

To enable essential workers to travel efficiently during the pandemic and promote recovery afterwards, SFMTA prioritized people with the fewest mobility choices over those with the most.

“It often takes a lot more staff time to do what is equitable rather than what is easy,” said Jeffrey Tumlin, SFMTA Director of Transportation, before adding that doing so will help the city survive and recover.

SFMTA transit map screenshot

Public transportation is a lifeline. Transportation networks don’t just connect people to employment centers, but also to basic resources like groceries and hospitals.

During the pandemic, Go-RTS in Gainesville, Florida used Remix to prioritize transit service for families needing access to meal distribution sites.

Based on the demographic data they analyzed in Remix, they were able to effectively restructure bus routes to serve as many families in the area as they could.

Notable Remix Features for these use cases: Transit Network Drawing, Presentation Studio

COVID pushed cities to quickly plan everything from pop-up bike lanes, temporary parklets, and slow street networks at record speeds.

New Orleans pedestrianizing key corridors

Public health concerns highlighted the need for street design that promoted safe social distancing, so New Orleans accelerated their work on pedestrianizing key corridors.

Streateries

Remix customers like Seattle, Washington and Montgomery County, Maryland reimagined the right-of-way to accommodate cherished aspects of public life, such as outdoor dining in temporary streateries.

Notable Remix Features for these use cases: Concept Designs, Street Elements, Quick Build Kit, Advanced Editing for Remix Streets

Transit agencies became first responders to climate disasters.

RVTD emergency transit routes

Within a single week, the Alameda fire tore through multiple towns in Oregon and destroyed 3,000 homes.

The fire closed a major transportation artery, causing complications for evacuees who were suddenly displaced and needed to access shelter.

Within a day, RVTD in Medford, Oregon put together three new routes around the highway closure and communicated these emergency routes with the public.

Notable Remix Features for these use cases: Transit Network Drawing, Presentation Studio

2020 highlighted systemic inequalities, especially ones experienced by the Black community. City streets were center stage for protests, memorials, and the growing Black Lives Matter movement.

RVTD emergency transit routes

After the killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, people banded together, on city streets, to protest and show support for the growing Black Lives Matter movement.

These were emotional and powerful moments of civic engagement. Some cities, like Los Angeles, California and Buffalo, New York, and many others, officially commissioned Black Lives Matter murals across several streets or renamed public spaces in remembrance of Black Lives lost or in support of the BLM movement.

In 2020, streets played a critical role in being a place of protest and public participation.

RVTD emergency transit routes

Improving equitable transportation outcomes is at the core of Remix’s values. In 2020, as part of Elemental Excelerator’s Equity and Access program, we partnered with 13 cities and 6 transportation advocacy organizations to improve cities’ ability to plan and design for mobility equity.

Following this research and collaboration, we developed a new Remix feature called Breakdown Tables, which enables deeper and more flexible data analysis to better assess community impact of different transit proposals.

Notable Remix Features for these use cases: Breakdown Tables

Despite one of the toughest years in transportation history, we ultimately feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude for the resilience of our customers. Ironically, in a year when we couldn’t get together, we found more strength in our communities than ever.

Our customers found new ways to collaborate with their partners.

Metro Transit streets screenshot

Metro Transit and the City of Minneapolis found creative ways to collaborate on large-scale, multi-agency transportation projects.

By using Remix as a common platform, they were able to clearly communicate stakeholder tradeoffs and emphasize project benefits even in a remote setting.

Team members at Metro Transit could now comment directly on Street concepts that their City of Minneapolis counterparts had designed in Remix, keeping the sharing of ideas organized in one platform.

RVTD emergency transit routes

Similarly, by using Remix to collaborate remotely, SEPTA in Philadelphia, PA and the City of Philadelphia pushed forward key transit priority projects that were temporarily on hold at the start of the pandemic.

Their Transit First initiative is a critical piece to enhancing the transportation network and ensuring a healthy recovery for the region.

Notable Remix Features for these use cases: Concept Designs, Advanced Editing for Remix Streets, Remix Commenting

In 2020, the Remix community became more global and diverse.

Remix customer map

2020 brought 46 new customers, including our first ever customers in South America, Africa, and Russia.

New customer highlight

DTPR in Santiago, Chile, our first customer in Chile, plans to design all the rural and urban transportation in Chile (outside of Santiago) using Remix. We’re excited to be part of their important work connecting urban centers with remote areas, and hope to visit someday!

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In 2020, we launched Remix for Educators to introduce human-centered collaborative mapping to the next generation of professionals and help students prepare for the critical work of transportation planning.

person using Remix platform on laptop

Over 2,100 new users experienced our platform for the first time this year.

Their perspective and feedback are valuable inputs as we continue to build Remix to better serve the diverse needs of our growing customer community.

Transpo Talk Slack Community

In April 2020, we launched Transpo Talk, a private Slack community for transportation professionals to gather and navigate the COVID-19 crisis and recovery together.

Public sector folks from all over the world came together online to share knowledge and resources, keep up-to-date on news, and connect with like-minded professionals for support and camaraderie.

Since then, Transpo Talk has grown to over 650 members with more than 1,500 conversations and regular virtual events.

We partnered with other innovative transportation companies to enable our customers to do more with less.

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Historical Data

Swiftly

We partnered with Swiftly to help customers visualize historical bus speed and dwell time data, enabling them to validate different transit priority projects for stakeholder support.

inrix

We brought INRIX historical traffic speed data for transportation planners to have more context on the underlying performance of their streets. Speed data is crucial for shaping the right goal for each street.

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Mobility Partnerships

Many of our customers use Remix to understand movement patterns for micromobility in their cities. To date, we have processed data from over 12 micromobility providers via the Mobility Data Specification. Understanding demand for movement helps prioritize projects when there are limited resources.

With limited resources, budget cuts, and continued uncertainty caused by the pandemic, transit agencies are channeling creative problem solving by exploring unconventional solutions like on-demand microtransit programs.

That’s why we partnered with companies like Spare Labs and experimented with passenger load and new sources of origin destination data.

Our 350+ city customers continued to shape our platform.

Collaboration

Transit agencies and DOTs are increasingly tasked with tackling citywide goals of improving the community’s safety, sustainability, and equity outcomes. With such lofty goals, transportation planning has become very interdisciplinary, making a planner’s role dependent on widespread and timely collaboration.

Despite this trend, there hasn’t been a collaboration tool specifically designed for transportation planning. That is why we launched Remix Commenting. With Remix Commenting, planners can collect and manage feedback from colleagues and stakeholders, in the same platform where they conduct analysis and create plans.

Remix Commenting product screenshot

Remix Commenting was inspired by interviews with 34 transportation professionals across 18 organizations in two stages of research: 1) a workflow deep-dive, and 2) demonstrations of design prototypes that we created.

One of the design prototypes was referred to as “Collaborative Mapping” (now Remix Commenting). Of the transportation planners surveyed, at least 31 answered that “Collaborative Mapping” would “solve a significant problem for me” or that they would “advocate strongly to have Collaborative Mapping at their agency. This particular quote from a research participant illustrates the struggle they wanted to unblock:

“It’s the communication among different players who are involved in the project that is the most frustrating, and I hope that there’s something out there that can make this easier for higher level planning. Email communication is redundant and doesn’t always get the point across.”

COMMUNICAtion

Delivering information to passengers is a critical element of public outreach for transit agencies. Remix Transit makes this straightforward for agencies with Presentation Studio. Presentation Studio turns transit projects into public-facing materials by providing additional polish, customizations, and high resolution visuals.

Presentation Studio graphic

Presentation Studio started as a proof-of-concept prototype from a couple of Remixers who were trying to help one customer agency. Organically and informally, the use of the prototype spread across several organizations — we saw it used for everything from public meetings to rider guides to internal reports. After a few months of seeing high usage and hearing great feedback from customers, we decided to bring the prototype into the product as a new feature called Presentation Studio.

Advanced Editing in Remix Streets helps transportation professionals produce accurate, realistic, and compelling concept designs in order to communicate ideas more effectively, provide clarity for better cross functional collaboration, and build trust and consensus across the organization.

Advanced Editing product screenshot

We built Advanced Editing through multiple phases of product testing and customer feedback, and we are grateful for the time that our customers have provided. Their expertise helped our team cultivate a rich set of knowledge that translated to building something that enhances the Remix Streets experience and improves our customers’ project outcomes.

Data Driven Decision-Making

Remix Explore is a new product experience for discovering transportation data insights and sharing ideas rapidly. It can often take days or weeks to research ground conditions and map out community impacts of proposals — time that doesn’t exist when adapting to constantly shifting recovery timelines.

Explore speeds up discoverability so that cities can swiftly develop a broader range of transportation concepts and get good ideas off the ground quickly.

Remix Explore product screenshot

Explore was a Remix vision for years but the pandemic accelerated the conception. Remix customers have long wanted a place where grabbing data insights is intuitive, flexible, and quick. Often, we have heard that data analysis is bottlenecked with the GIS team, or depending on the size of the city, the one GIS specialist. Remix Explore is designed to democratize data analysis so that no one needs to stall when it comes to data driven decision-making.

Altogether, in 2020, Remix pushed 123 product updates across products.

Despite the global challenges of 2020, our customers continued serving their communities and pushed forward transportation projects that promote safer, more sustainable and equitable outcomes.

Remix commenting graphic

Despite working-from-home, our customers remained connected to each other and to the communities that they serve.

Since the launch of Remix commenting in November, people exchanged a total 2,300 comments in Remix maps, 1,000 of which represented input from members of the community.

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The pandemic accelerated the need to pull community insights for prioritizing projects and making data-driven decisions.

•  In 2020, there were a total of ~70,000 interactions with Remix data layers,
•  Remix users conducted a total of ~48,000 Stats Grabs,
•  Over 320 organizations used Jane Walkshed.

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The pandemic did not slow down the efforts of our customers.

Our customers created a grand total of 24,021 unique projects in Remix, a 31% increase from 2019. 73% of these projects were created during the pandemic. In Remix Streets alone, we saw a 3x increase in projects in 2020.

In 2021, let’s continue to be inspired and find motivation in the commitment of cities and local governments across the world to public service. Let’s pull our collective creativity to build technology that helps make cities more livable. 2021, we’re ready for you!

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

—James Baldwin