Riggs, Boswell and Ross describe their pilot street design project deploying Streetplan, a version of the opensource tool Streetmix. As part of the City of San Luis Obispo downtown revisioning project, their efforts inform the process, currently underway, of revising the Downtown Vision Concept Plan. The project was presented at the 2016 Code for America Summit

Boswell, Michael R

Riggs, William W

Ross, Ryder

English

DigitalCommons@CalPoly

FOCUS  13  EssaysRiggs, Boswell and Ross describe their pilot street design project deploying Streetplan, a version of the open-source tool Streetmix. As part of the City of San Luis Obispo downtown revisioning project, their efforts inform the process, currently underway, of revising the Downtown Vision Concept Plan. The project was presented at the 2016 Code for America Summit.Streetplan: Hacking Streetmix for Community-Based Outreach on the Future of StreetsMichael R. BoswellPhD, AICP; Professor, City and Regional Planning Department, Cal Poly.William RiggsPhD, AICP; Assistant Professor, City and Regional Planning Department, Cal Poly.Ryder RossWeb Designer, San Luis Obispo.Figure 1: Example of cross section using Streetplan.Streetplan is a tool created in 2016 building on the open-source, Code for America project, Streetmix. The goal of the tool is to provide dynamic, participatory planning of streets, supporting traditional community based methods with a digital infrastructure that allows for real-time information submission and dissemination. The tool allows for urban planners and decision-makers to capture and then aggregate public feedback on the future vision on how streets can be made more healthy and livable.  IntroductionTransportation behavior is becoming ever-more complex as digital information serves to moderate travel behavior and research has shown that community based digital tools can be effectively used to shape the built environment for walking and biking (Riggs & Gordon, 2015). This proliferation of geospatial information provides an additional tool for influencing behavior through mobile frameworks and through digital representation tools. For example, tools like SeeClickFix and Streetmix have been used to do conceptual design of sustainable streets.  Likewise tools like Mindmixer and Brigade have been shown to increase public participation and be supportive of community-based and participatory planning (CBPP) methods (Evans-Cowley & Griffin, 2012; Riggs, 2016). In academic circles this has given rise to the idea of urban infor-matics and quantified activities; or the ability for individuals to know and disseminate their location-based-information includ-ing built environment attributes, perceptions and observations, activities conducted, trip times and type, money spent, etc. (Carrel, Ekambaram, Gaker, Sengupta, & Walker, 2012).  This geo-spatial information, which is already being used to influence behavior in other fields, can be applied to planning and envi-ronmental design, and therein lies the goal of this project – to combine digital tools with CBPP methods and facilitate collab-orative design of the built environment for walking and biking.Project OverviewIn 2016 our team undertook a pilot street design project as a part of the Vision San Luis Obispo project in San Luis Obispo, CA. The project involved deploying a version of StreetMix (which we called StreetPlan) using a case study street in the City of San Luis Obispo, and then capturing data from citizens about what the future vision for that street, space or urban area—articulating how the public at large prefers and how they want to allocate active transportation resources in that location. While we had appreciated the functionality of Streetmix the product did not allow us to capture public input and to aggregate this for decision-making and planning purposes in a way that was bounded by the reality of the existing right-of-way. Our modified version allowed for us to engage participants on street priorities in a constrained environment and then to combine those priorities to show community preferences. The goal of providing these community priorities and trade offs was to inform street section planning, design and traffic modeling / simulation. Ultimately it provided a community-based process for getting cities to get a data-driven pulse on community preferences and to articulate those results online and in plans.FOCUS  13  ■  ■  59Figures 2 & 3: The pilot street design project as a part of the Vision San Luis Obispo project in San Luis Obispo, CA. Figure 4: Survey results showing community preferences for Higuera Street redesign.DevelopmentIn terms of backend development, we forked the Streetmix Github repository so we could keep track of our changes to the code. We began with a default street layout and made this a fixed option, changing the default street width, the building height, the number of lanes and type of lanes to look like our case street.  We also identified which features we wanted to update, change or remove in the base Github package in order to make our tool easier to use and simpler to understand. We removed features such as: the Twitter sign in; My Streets feature; and the Sharing streets via Twitter which we felt would distract from our goals. After that, we added a Submit Street feature, which asked the user for some basic demographic information and if they would mind being contacted / providing contact information. On the backend, we wanted to track which streets were submitted, so we changed the database schema to allow for a new ‘submitted’ boolean. We also added an API endpoint to handle the submissions, and send an email out, similar to how the feedback feature works currently. Once that was functional, we changed the welcome message to instruct the users on what we wanted them to do while using the tool. DeploymentWhile the interface and development provided a tool, onsite data gathering was critical to the project’s success. Data was gathered at a public event where our team was available to assist with any issues.  We set up a bank of computers with wifi-enabled hotspots for the public to congregate and submit their “street plans” as pictured below. While we anticipated that the tool could be used to collect data in a virtual environment we cannot underscore enough the power of using it in an onsite, community-centric environment. While our tool could be used to collect information beyond the event, based on our experience the process of having citizens work through design options alongside others was very useful. People engaged in important discussions on the trade-offs Riggs, Boswell & Ross: Streetplan■  FOCUS  13 60  ■ EssaysFigure 5: The community idea for a bike boulevard.faced (e.g. if you have more space dedicated to bicycles then that leaves less space not only for cars but for pedestrians), and made decisions based on those discussions; grappling with these issues in parallel with others.  This underscored an important distinction of our tool in that we bounded the street based on the reality of the existing right-of-way available—something very different than the Streetmix tool which can allow for portrayal of streets that extend beyond the realm of feasible alternatives in engineering most streets. ReportingThe data collected was aggregated and analyzed the submis-sions that were received. To do this we wrote a number of Mon-goDB database queries on the entries that had been logged (over 200) to find out information including: • How many streets were submitted• How many lanes were used• How many submitted streets had bike lines, parklets• How many streets had no parkingWe provided the City with a summary of the aggregate data in .csv format and also provide a memorandum that summarized the key points from the data. This included summaries of the data on the type of features that had been preferred (as shown in the graph below), along with example submissions, and a discussion of opportunities and constraints based on our experience in transportation engineering. FutureThere is ample room in the future to bring this type of technology to the community. Given appropriate marketing and extended development, we anticipate that are between 30 and 80 cities that could be interested in such a software-as-a-service over the next 1-2 years based on the number of cities in the US conducting streetscape plans.1Next steps in extending this work are to refine the tool and to begin work with other cities who want to engage the public in reshaping streets. Furthermore, since we began our project, the base Streetmix code has been updated, and we intend pulling those changes into our repository and to contribute migrating the code to the React/Redux framework. Finally, we intend to migrate our tool to a new domain, Restreet.com.Ultimately the goal for these and other creative initiatives con-tinues to be to see more sustainable and safe streets for all.REFERENCESCarrel, A., Ekambaram, V., Gaker, D., Sengupta, R., & Walker, J. L. (2012). The Quantified Traveler: Changing transport behavior with personalized travel data feedback. Re-trieved from http://www.uctc.net/research/papers/UCTC-FR-2012-12.pdfEvans-Cowley, J., & Griffin, G. (2012). Microparticipation with Social Media for Community Engagement in Transporta-tion Planning. Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, 2307, 90–98. http://doi.org/10.3141/2307-10Riggs, W. (2016). Mobile responsive websites and local plan-ning departments in the US: Opportunities for the fu-ture. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 0265813516656375. http://doi.org/10.1177/ 02658135166 56375Riggs, W., & Gordon, K. (2015). How is mobile technology changing city planning? Developing a taxonomy for the future. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 0265813515610337. http://doi.org/10.1177/ 0265813515 6103371 We estimate that of the roughly 22,000 municipalities in the US, ap-proximately 1 in 5 are doing some type of streetscape or circulation plan every year based on the normal 5-year time horizon for such documents that is usually established by local ordinance. Of these 4,400 cities if such software solutions could capture only 1% that would equate to 44 cities a year interested in using such a tool.

Streetplan: Hacking Streetmix for community-based outreach on the future of streets

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Streetplan: Hacking Streetmix for community-based outreach on the future of streets

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