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.
For the new overnight service, they designed and implemented a system that added 344 more buses (a 146% increase from their previous 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Their Transit First initiative is a critical piece to enhancing the transportation network and ensuring a healthy recovery for the region.
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!
Their perspective and feedback are valuable inputs as we continue to build Remix to better serve the diverse needs of our growing customer community.
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 Swiftly to help customers visualize historical bus speed and dwell time data, enabling them to validate different transit priority projects for stakeholder support.
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.
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.
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 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.”
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.
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.
Explore speeds up discoverability so that cities can swiftly develop a broader range of transportation concepts and get good ideas off the ground quickly.
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.
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.
• 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.
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.