Hi HN! I'm the Director of Engineering at UrbanFootprint (https://urbanfootprint.com/), one of the companies featured in the National Geographic article. Peter Calthorpe is a cofounder of the company. The El Camino corridor is highlighted at the beginning of the National Geographic article. If you want to dig into more details on that please take a look at our blog post on the topic from last year (https://urbanfootprint.com/can-one-street-solve-the-san-fran...).

At UrbanFootprint, we provide data and tools for urban planners to assess and compare the impacts of land use and transportation decisions. A basic use case is a city updating its General Plan, which would start with a forecast of how much population growth is anticipated / needs to be accommodated. A planner then needs to assess where new residents will live, work, shop, and play. Perhaps even more essential, how are people going to travel between all of these activities? Will the new growth be auto-dependent, transit-focused, walkable? Is any of the existing or planned development in hazard areas such as flood of wildfire? What are the energy and water use impacts of the plans?

We’re using Python and Postgres/PostGIS on the backend to answer these questions and a React SPA to serve it up and make it interactive in a browser. It's a lot of fun getting our hands dirty with data describing the physical world in which we live in now, in addition to modeling the future of cities.

If this type of work interests you please get in touch - email me at hn@urbanfootprint.com. I'm always interested in hearing from folks who want to use technology to improve cities.