Transportation Game Night

[mateoclarke]

Transportation Game Night

Austin Monitor & Glasshouse Policy are hosting a Transportation Game Night at the Google Fiber space on Tuesday, October 18th.

RSVP details TBD

This event is a mix of social, trivia, and participatory planning gatherings. Open Austin participated in the planning of a similar event in August, Budget Game Night, by "hacking together" http://austinbudget.party/.

Right now, we're envisioning using Streetmix to engage the public in a conversation about reconstructing key Austin corridors to match their vision for Austin's mobility system. We would like to incorporate data being collected by Austin Transportation department, CapMetro, and other potential sources to provide an educational and interactive experience for attendees.

Here are the 7 key intersections within the corridors under consideration for additional funding in November's election.

—Guadelupe and MLK —Airport and E 51st —Burnet and West Anderson —N. Lamar and Rundberg —FM 969 and SH130 —East Riverside and South Pleasant Valley —South Lamar and Barton Springs Road

What are the next steps (validation, research, coding, design)?

For one activity at the Transportation Game Night, we are planning a contest called "Guess the Intersection".

I'm creating Streetmix representations of each of the 7 intersections. Contestants will guess/match the intersections by analyzing the Streetmix portrayal and using other clues. There is an opportunity here to pair the intersection illustrations with open data like bus routes, bus frequency, volume counters, etc.

If you are interesting in helping us liberate data or have ideas about designing a visualization for these 7 intersections, please contact me and/or comment below.

[jonplaca]

Potential Categories for Intersection data:

• Past/Planned Construction (how do we form a question without
• Zoning Codes
• Surrounding Areas (proximity to government services)
• Avg rent in surrounding area and/or YoY rent increase
• History of Incidents (crime, fire, etc)
• Most small businesses (?)
• Proximity to moon tower
• Bus routes
• Traffic Volume (wait time, queue depth, speed limit)
• Sidewalk width
• Bike Lanes + width
• Pedestrian volume (?)
• Crash Fatalities by Location (https://data.austintexas.gov/Public-Safety/2012-APD-Crash-Fatality-Data/ergh-7g8p)

[mateoclarke]

https://github.com/open-austin/transpo-game-night

[mateoclarke]

This morning, we had a meeting with the following parties to solidify the direction for the Transpo Game Night (which is now just 5 1/2 weeks away):

• Michael Kanin (Austin Monitor)
• Tom Visco & Grace Atkins (Glasshouse Policy)
• Jackie Nirenberg (CapMetro)
• Ben Holland (Rocky Mountain Institute)
• Cheyenne Krause, John Clary, Liane Miller (Austin Transportation Dept aka ATD)
• Me (Open Austin)

Key decisions:

• We want to move forward with two distinct activities for the Transpo Game Night. Participants will work in teams and compete in a trivia style format.
  1. "Guess the Intersection" using a static cross profile and other data about the intersection.
  2. "Design a Better Corridor" with Streetmix
• For "Guess the Intersection" we should edit the list of intersections to include more than just Mobility Bond intersections because of ATD/Cap Metro involvement (see more below).
• For "Design a Better Corridor" we need to add a component adjacent to Streetmix that will give teams a rubric that impose constraints on the actions they take in their Streetmix design by attaching "costs" of some of the drag and drop options in Streetmix. Each team will start with a fixed amount of "money" to spend to enact their changes and they will be limited in how many changes they make. The most basic vision for this scoring component is an Excel or Google Spreadsheet that participants would fill out as the use Streetmix. This rubric will provide scoring system for comparing team designs.

Action items:

• [ ] Reselect intersections for the "Guess the Intersection" Game. (Kanin)
  • Here is the working list discussed at the meeting. Needs further attention
  • S Congress at Oltorf
  • Pleasant Valley and Riverside (in mobility bond)
  • Guadalupe and MLK (in mobility bond)
  • 5/6th & Lamar
  • Airport and E 51st (in mobility bond)
  • Burnet and West Anderson (in mobility bond)
  • East Riverside and South Pleasant Valley (in mobility bond)
• [ ] Create starting template in Streetmix for "Design a Better Corridor" using the South Lamar & Barton Spring Road intersection (Mateo/Open Austin)
  • _Because ATD can't do anything that would give off the perception of advocating for or against the Mobility Bond in Nov election, we can use real data about this intersection, but the name of the intersection should remain anonymous to the user throughout the exercise._
  • Mateo may need to look to others specify which street on the intersection to cross profile, and which side of that street.
• [ ] wrangle data for South Lamar & Barton Spring Road & 7 other intersections (Open Austin)
• [ ] Decide Grading Categories/Metics (CapMetro, RMI, ATD)
• [ ] Come up rubric and excel template, dollars to spend (Visco)

---

Here are some other notes for more context:

Overall goals/needs:

• cost mechanism for adding features on Streetmix
• incorporate land use in some way (is changing the building height on the side of the Streetmix enough?)
  • Envision Tomorrow, cost factors, corridors more expensive to build in.
  • estimate street impact fees, into the weeds here
• ATD can't advocate for bond item, thus we need to be careful about what streets we use and how the activities are framed.

Ideas for Streetmix activity:

• allocate costs to drag and drop features, (ex: 100 points to start, costs 10 pts for a shared bus lane)
• carrying capacity of all the modes vs just automobile
• bike ped comfort
• consider negative points for constrains, (ex: too many bus lanes)
• purchasing the right of way as a cost
• same starting point for all teams.
• The hard part will be gamifying the rubric. An excel template a good place to start?
• Anon intersection/starting point for intersection will be South Lamar and Barton Springs Road.

What are the things we should measure?

• walkability score?
• transit score, throughput per hour vs. auto throughput
• need more thought here
• Bus frequency

[jonplaca]

@mateoclarke

Thanks for the update!

Based off of your discussion, would you still like me to proceed with aggregating data (see: https://github.com/open-austin/project-ideas/issues/77#issuecomment-243631207)? If not, I can readjust my efforts to focusing on streetmix.

With regards to Streetmix: The fastest way of doing this, in my opinion, is to create an excel workbook that has inputs (e.g "sidewalk width", "road width", "building height", etc.) and have a macro reformat a sheet's cell/row height (based on these inputs). Furthermore, a cost breakdown can be automatically applied based on the previously mentioned inputs (e.g 1 ft of sidewalk = $500 and a 10% increase in congestion [a metric worth tracking]). However, please note that this is the totally hacked way of bridging the gap between an interactive, finance-driven tool. Also note, while on-paper this seems executable, I am sure there will be challenges.

Happy to proceed whichever way you see fit

[johnclary]

happy to help with data wrangling and will be thinking about potential additional sources that Austin Transportation can provide.

once we get all the spatial data in one place it should be easy enough to associate each intersection with the features within some distance of it, e.g. 1000ft.

would be fund to makes maps, too.

[jonplaca]

Sounds good. Raw data to be uploaded tonight

[mateoclarke]

@KidLogic, I think data wraggling is still the right way to proceed at this point and the format you outlined sounds great.

But let's focus on getting data for the South Lamar & Barton Spring Road first. The other intersections need to be finalized and focusing on that one intersection will probably give us a good idea of what data is actually interesting or valuable before proceeding to the rest. Cool?

[mateoclarke]

Closing this out

The original idea wasn't incorporated into the scheduled Game Night, so the group has talked about how to pivot this effort. We should open a fresh project idea once that happens.

Conversation is active in our Slack org under #transpo-game-night. Invite yourself to our slack here

A github repo was also started. This could be renamed and/or repurposed.