A startup called Remix that builds foolproof, drag-and-drop tools for urban planners raised $15m to expand its services.
Now that America’s city streets have morphed into mobility minefields filled with scooters, bikes, buses, and weird-looking hoverboards, traditional transportation planning has become trickier than ever. That’s where Remix’s platform comes in.
New cities need new systems
“This is an industry that has changed faster in the last 5 years than it did in the last 50,” Tiffany Chu, COO and co-founder, told TechCrunch. “One of our challenges is explaining to people… what are the impacts of certain decisions around the way things have always been?”
Today, public buses share crowded streets — making it difficult for outdated urban planning models to predict how adjusting one knob will impact the whole operation.
So Remix’s platform offers tools for urban planners to quickly forecast how adding a single bike lane or bus route would impact a city’s overall traffic.
Drag, drop… design a city
Remix’s system allows urban planners to model complex bus, train, car, and bike routes using a drag and drop menu that could have come from a 6-year-old’s video game.
The system’s success is measured by a tiny, anthropomorphized icon named Jane: By dropping Jane on a map, engineers can model how far Jane could travel in 15, 30, 45, or 60 minutes based on recent changes.
Remix’s system, which is currently in use by 300 cities, already shapes the mobility of 100m people, and with its new funding the company hopes to Remix it up even more.