Streetmix – A fun little urban design playground | Hacker News Reader

Streetmix – A fun little urban design playground

streetmix.net

77 pointswilg19 comments

If you like streetmix you might also like https://3d.st a related project I've been working on.

Also shout out to this amazing project too https://github.com/a-b-street/abstreet

How do I "learn how all of this can impact your community"?

I can change the street layout and it looks pretty. Fair enough. But what tells me how my design impacts the number of shops and accessibly for the elderly and children, air quality, etc?

Forget all that - what about giving access to the garbage truck?

I lived in a city the centre of which was "walkable" - one often overlooked issue in such places is that there are no adequate garbage containers, so you have to keep all your waste until it's garbage day.

And you'd better not miss garbage day - especially with organic waste during the summer - maggots appear after about 2-3 days.

What if part of the garbage truck's work was putting all the organic waste into each neighborhood's composter AND TENDING to it ? Sanitation workers with some training should have much more success at composting than Joe Schmoe. Use the compost in each neighborhood's parks. No other recyclable has this element of neighborhood reusability AFAICT.

That would be nice, but I'm afraid that there's easily an order of magnitude more organic waste than what would be the right amount for the greenery in cities.

True dat.

Some of the value statement around community impact is done in-person or through outreach leveraging the tools from Streetmix.

Other projects such as 3DStreet and A/B Street that I posted in another thread are also working on downstream impact of street configuration changes on quality of life. In A/B Street they work on the cascading effects of the change on other transportation users on surrounding routes. In 3DStreet we are working on impact for noise and pedestrian safety conditions using XR tools.

This doesn't feel like an answer. This feels like annoying grant-writing fluff talk.

"Some of the value statement around community impact is done in person or through community outreach..."?

How do you do a value statement in person? What could that possibly mean?

The project desperately needs a clear summary of purpose. You have like forty contributors, five Portuguese translators, fifteen coders, and I have no idea what this tool is for.

I can put the street in a location, on a map, and that does... what?

I even started in reading your blog and it still doesn't make any sense. Nobody involved in the project is saying what the thing is for. The guidebook doesn't say what it's for, it just lists the specifications of a bunch of streets and conventions for contributing and how you do dependency pinning and...

It's like an exercise in deliberate madness. Like a fake open source project.

https://thecityfix.com/blog/how-bogota-is-turning-7000-citiz...

Here's a "success story." Cities spend lots of time gathering feedback from citizens on transportation changes, but the feedback process can often exclude people who don't have time to physically go to town hall-type meetings. Or for those who do go, the options presented might not be easy to understand. And it's even harder for attendees to pitch their own variation. Streetmix made all of this easier, and it seems like it worked well in Bogotá.

You just pointed me to a 1,600 word article when I asked for a summary of what the project does.

This is the problem I'm describing.

It's major.

You need to be able to say what your software is for in one paragraph. Period.

One of my favorite projects, and a great example of how to use technology to help people understand and participate in street design decisions!

Once you get rid of the bike lanes and the transit shelter, you can get four traffic lanes and two parking lanes in there.

Huh, my first instinct was to remove further traffic lanes and add in a second dedicated bike lane

I was hoping to get a "score" on my design.

Similar - I was looking for the "Run simulation" button or similar. This seems like something that could be really fun to gamify.

You might want to checkout A/B Street which is an agent simulator. https://github.com/a-b-street/abstreet

I highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes if you are interested in learning more about this type of road design. It was really illuminating about some of the endemic problems with urban design in the US.

it's difficult to adjust the width of sidewalk, roads, etc.

This is so well done!

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