A/B Street
Ever been stuck in traffic on a bus, wondering why is there legal street parking
instead of a dedicated bus lane? A/B Street is a game exploring how small
changes to a city affect the movement of drivers, cyclists, transit users, and
pedestrians.
- Play on
Windows,
Mac,
Linux,
FreeBSD,
your web browser, or
read all instructions
(new releases every Sunday) - build from source
(new changes daily)
Show, don't tell
Find a problem:
Make some changes:
Measure the effects:
Documentation
- How A/B Street works
- Technical
- Presentations
- April 2020 Rust meetup:
recording,
slides - Feb 2020 traffic sim
- Oct 2019 Traffic sim and current challenges
- Oct 2019 Map construction
- April 2020 Rust meetup:
- Project
Roadmap and contributing
See the roadmap
for current work, including ways to help. If you want to bring this to your city
or if you're skilled in design, traffic simulation, data visualization, or
civic/government outreach, please contact Dustin Carlino at
dabreegster@gmail.com. Follow r/abstreet
for weekly updates or @CarlinoDustin for
occasional videos of recent progress.
Project mission
If you fix some traffic problem while playing A/B Street, my ultimate goal is
for your changes to become a real proposal for adjusting Seattle's
infrastructure. A/B Street is of course a game, using a simplified approach to
traffic modeling, so city governments still have to evaluate proposals using
their existing methods. A/B Street is intended as a conversation starter and
tool to communicate ideas with interactive visualizations.
Why not leave city planning to professionals? People are local experts on the
small slice of the city they interact with daily -- the one left turn lane that
always backs up or a certain set of poorly timed walk signals.
Laura Adler
writes:
"Only with simple, accessible simulation programs can citizens become active
generators of their own urban visions, not just passive recipients of options
laid out by government officials."
Existing urban planning software is either proprietary or hard to use. A/B
Street strives to be highly accessible, by being a fun, engaging game. See
here for more
guiding principles.
Credits
Core team:
- Dustin Carlino (dabreegster@gmail.com)
- Yuwen Li (UX)
- Michael Kirk
Others:
- All
contributors - Logo by Ryan Pierson
- Graphic design advice from Starcat Games,
Daniel Huffman,
Brian Prince - Character art by Holly Hansel
- Lightning-fast pathfinding thanks to
fast_paths by Andreas Barth
(easbar.mail@posteo.net) - Hackathon drop-ins from Democracy Lab events
- CUGOS and Julian Michael
have been great sounding boards for ideas since the beginning - In-game character faces adapted from
Anokhee Jandhyala - Pandemic modeling by Orestis Malaspinas (orestis.malaspinas@hesge.ch)
- Game design advice from Christopher Klein
- OSM expertise courtesy Mateusz Konieczny
- Lots of helpful PRs from Javed Nissar
- Lots of help with rendering SVG and fonts from
RazrFalcon and
nical
Data:
- Special thanks to all OpenStreetMap
contributors! - King County GIS
- Seattle Open Data
- Puget Sound Regional Council