Deeper Data Analysis with Remix's Breakdown Tables

Remix

Breakdown Tables in Remix allow you to instantly answer complex questions about race, poverty, housing, education, commute modes and more.

One thing in life is guaranteed: change is inevitable and constant. For cities, continuous change comes in the form of large, systemic shifts: shifts in population, government policy, infrastructure, and workplace culture. That’s why, in many ways, planners are tasked with the seemingly impossible: anticipating the future to ensure that projects implemented today will meet tomorrow’s needs. To achieve this task, cities must invest in methods of data analysis that are quick, flexible, and can communicate tradeoffs clearly. Remix’s newest feature, Breakdown Tables, provides the ideal format for data-driven decision making. 

The pandemic highlighted the importance of nimble data analysis. In March 2020, change came suddenly: public health policies and workplace requirements shifted dramatically across the globe. Cities had little time to adapt. More and more of them turned to tools like Remix. In the wake of the COVID crisis, Go-RTS in Gainesville, Florida used Remix’s data functionality to connect low-income families to free meal services by analyzing demographic data alongside transit routes and meal distribution centers. 

Go-RTS used Remix to understand how well their transit network connected low-income families to free meals.

Breakdown Tables take Remix’s data capabilities one step further. Remix’s Breakdown Tables allow you to instantly see the interaction between multiple demographic variables. This type of complex data analysis saves planners many precious hours refining grant applications, building responsive outreach plans, and determining potential impacts of infrastructure investments. 

Breakdown Tables is easy to use because it is an extension to Remix’s existing data workflow. To use Breakdown Tables, start with a Stats Grab in our data platform, Remix Explore. Stats Grabs give you flexible ways to identify your geography of interest, whether that is a street segment, transit line, custom shape, or pre-determined region, like a Census Tract or city boundary.


Breakdown Tables allow you to dig deeper by cross-tabulating multiple data sets. The video below shows how quickly you can understand commute modes by poverty level along key corridors.


The method is simple, but the outcome is powerful. 

In our equity webinar on October 2020, Remix’s Data Visualization Manager, Rebekah Watkins, outlined the typically painful process of conducting demographic analysis with data from the U.S. Census Bureau.  Historically, collecting and analyzing census data was complex, time-intensive, and required expertise in both Census data and GIS. Often this meant that the few city staffers with this expertise became the bottleneck for an entire government department’s data analysis, since no one else could operate the software. By contrast, Remix’s Breakdown Tables can be quickly understood and used by employees of all disciplines, democratizing data analysis and helping city governments save time and move faster. 

Want to see Breakdown Tables at work in your city? We’d love to show you. Reach out at remix.com/demo.