From Medium — You’re a Street Designer (you just don’t know it yet) — The Design Principles Behind Streetmix

Chances are that smaller streets around you are changing,  — as is our way of thinking about them. While streets were originally built with people in mind (a century ago, it wasn’t uncommon for parents to just feel safe to tell their kids to go play in the street, even in a big city center), throughout the last century we largely surrendered them to car traffic. However, many city planners and urban designers are revisiting that approach and re-imagining streets as once again more pedestrian-, bike-, and public transit-friendly.

A typical way to communicate new ideas is via a “street section” — a slice of the road illustrating all of its parts side by side, from the building on one end, to the building on the other.

This web-based street section editor was built as a side project by a small team of fellows at Code for America, a non-profit dedicated to finding ways to apply modern technology practices to city governments. Code for America believes in open source, open data, and citizen engagement through web applications, and Streetmix is a direct extension of that way of thinking. More at: You’re a street designer (you just don’t know it yet) — Medium 

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Recently here in Nanaimo on a Facebook neighbourhood group page discussion turned to traffic calming on a residential thru-street and with Streetmix I was able to contribute this street redesign: