Prospective WZDx Specification Adopter: Remix

[ericciardi1]

Below is a summary of the conversation between the WZDx Specification support team and Remix, a prospective WZDx data consumer whose organization is building a web-based platform to empower cities to plan the best possible transportation system.

Courtney Sung (@casung) – Head of Business Development and Strategy at Remix, and Tom Mercer – Chief Product Officer, detailed the potential uses and barriers to adopting usage of the WZDx Specification.

Prospective WZDx Specification Adopter: Remix

Remix provides web-based software to help cities plan their transportation systems. More than 340 cities use some part of the Remix software platform, which includes components for planning transit, designing streets, understanding and setting policies for micromobility, and exploring transportation planning scenarios. Underneath all these components is a data platform that supports standards such as GTFS, Shared Streets, GBFS, and MDS. Tom Mercer, Chief Product Officer of Remix says “We’ve been early adopters of lots of data standards. These standards enable data-driven decision-making, richer analysis, and reduce friction for integrating with existing systems and workflows.”

Remix is interested in the development of the WZDx Specification and other data standards. Some possible uses of the WZDx data format in Remix software include:

• Ingestion of work zone events into the data platform for analysis in conjunction with other data. One such use might be a buffer analysis of how many people are affected by a work zone event. Planned work zone data would enhance functionality in Remix’s Transit product for a transit agency to plan detours in response to a city’s planned work zone events with less friction.

• Publishing planned work zone events and in the full context of other street changes, as Remix software is used to communicate shared mobility policies. Changes to street usage rules increasingly impact various modes differently, and so it may be useful to harmonize the process of developing, publishing, and enforcing those street usage changes.

Courtney Sung, Head of Business Development and Strategy at Remix says “Hearing USDOT is supporting efforts so that more than a dozen cities will be using WZDx next year is very motivating. Remix has always been most interested in specifications that begin with a major adoption push or impetus so that they can become broadly utilized standards.”