[dabreegster]

Thank you for the industry insight! I'm definitely not trying to match the degree of realism and calibration with the professional stuff -- there's no way I could, without way more resources. A/B Street's simulation is more for visualization than getting meaningful results -- although I am quite proud of the dataviz we've baked in.

From talking to planners, reaching for these tools is a huge time and money commitment, even assuming they have a license and somebody trained to use it. Some ideas don't even get off the ground, and some projects take community feedback after spending months building the initial models. I think there's a huge missing space for rapid prototyping. The fact that I see planning agencies regularly include graphics from streetmix.net is evidence of this -- it's a quick way to communicate, so often how a conversation starts. I'd simply like to expand that space.

[takk309]

At the end of the day better communication between the public, engineers, planners, and respective agencies is the goal. We have a joke that gets repeated all too often, everyone is a traffic engineer, just ask them! Rapid iteration is key to be able to look at all scenarios, no matter how crazy they may be.