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<ol class="chapter"><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../../index.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">1.</strong> Overview</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../../howto/index.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">2.</strong> Instructions</a></li><li><ol class="section"><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../../howto/new_city.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">2.1.</strong> Importing a new city</a></li></ol></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../../how_it_works.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">3.</strong> How it works</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../../case_studies/index.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">4.</strong> Case studies</a></li><li><ol class="section"><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../../case_studies/lake_wash.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">4.1.</strong> Lake Washington Blvd Stay Healthy Street</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../../case_studies/west_seattle.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">4.2.</strong> West Seattle mitigations</a></li><li class="spacer"></li></ol></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../../dev/index.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">5.</strong> Developer guide</a></li><li><ol class="section"><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../../dev/misc_tricks.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">5.1.</strong> Misc developer tricks</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../../dev/api.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">5.2.</strong> API</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../../dev/testing.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">5.3.</strong> Testing</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../../dev/mass_import.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">5.4.</strong> Importing many maps</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../../dev/data.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">5.5.</strong> Data organization</a></li></ol></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../../map/index.html"><strong 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href="../../map/edits.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">6.3.</strong> Live edits</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../../map/platform.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">6.4.</strong> Exporting</a></li></ol></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../../trafficsim/index.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">7.</strong> Traffic simulation</a></li><li><ol class="section"><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../../trafficsim/discrete_event.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">7.1.</strong> Discrete event simulation</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../../trafficsim/travel_demand.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">7.2.</strong> Travel demand</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../../trafficsim/gridlock.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">7.3.</strong> Gridlock</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../../trafficsim/trips.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">7.4.</strong> Multi-modal trips</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../../trafficsim/live_edits.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">7.5.</strong> Live edits</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../../trafficsim/parking.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">7.6.</strong> Parking</a></li><li class="spacer"></li></ol></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../../project/index.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">8.</strong> Project</a></li><li><ol class="section"><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../../project/roadmap.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">8.1.</strong> Roadmap</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../../project/motivations.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">8.2.</strong> Motivations</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../../project/history/index.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">8.3.</strong> History</a></li><li><ol class="section"><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../../project/history/backstory.html" class="active"><strong aria-hidden="true">8.3.1.</strong> Backstory</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../../project/history/year1.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">8.3.2.</strong> Year 1</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../../project/history/year2.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">8.3.3.</strong> Year 2</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../../project/history/year3.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">8.3.4.</strong> Year 3</a></li></ol></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../../project/CHANGELOG.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">8.4.</strong> Full CHANGELOG</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../../project/references.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">8.5.</strong> References</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../../project/collaborations.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">8.6.</strong> Collaborations</a></li></ol></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../../side_projects/index.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">9.</strong> Side projects</a></li><li><ol class="section"><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../../side_projects/santa.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">9.1.</strong> 15-minute Santa</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../../side_projects/parking_mapper.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">9.2.</strong> Mapping on-street parking</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../../side_projects/osm_viewer.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">9.3.</strong> OpenStreetMap viewer</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../../side_projects/fifteen_min.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">9.4.</strong> 15-minute neighborhoods explorer</a></li></ol></li></ol>
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<h1 class="menu-title">A/B Street</h1>
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<h1><a class="header" href="#backstory" id="backstory">Backstory</a></h1>
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<p>I originally wanted to tell a much longer story here of how I came to work on
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A/B Street, but I'm not sure this is the right time yet. So consider this the
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quick version.</p>
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<p>I grew up in Baton Rouge, where driving is effectively the only mode of
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transport. (I've gone back and made a point of taking long walks to confirm how
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antagonistically the city is designed towards walking.) Very early on, I fell in
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love with a Nintendo 64 game called Banjo Kazooie, which led me to the online
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fan communities of the early 2000's. I wanted to create games too, so I started
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learning programming via library books and lots of questions on IRC. Because I
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never had any confidence in art, I wound up working on
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<a href="https://github.com/dabreegster/mnemonicrl/">roguelikes</a>, which led to a fervent
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interest in pathfinding algorithms and
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<a href="http://www.cs.colorado.edu/%7Eralex/papers/PDF/OOPSLA06antiobjects.pdf">collaborative diffusion</a>.
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When I started driving in high school, I quickly realized how bad people were at
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it. I remember being stuck at the intersection of
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<a href="https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/1279204989">Florida Blvd and Cloud</a> and
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first wondering if the pathfinding algorithms could help with traffic. Can you
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see where this is going?</p>
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<p><img src="cloud_florida.jpg" alt="Impatience is a virtue" /></p>
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<p>I moved to Austin for college. One of the first days of class, I shuffled down
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the stairs of Gearing Hall past a crackly old speaker apocalyptically announcing
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the weather forecast (details add color, right?) into a seminar demanding a
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totally open-ended first assignment to do something interesting. After I left,
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somebody stopped to ask me for directions, but I didn't know campus well yet. I
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thought about how Google Maps gave really silly walking directions. So I decided
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I'd hand-draw a map of campus, showing all of the construction, how to cut
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through the labryinth that is Welch Hall on hot days, and where to find the 24/7
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robot coffee machines, and hack together a routing engine to help people find
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the shortest path between their classes. The feedback I got on this assignment
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included something along the lines of, "I was really pretty impressed first that
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you would be so stupid as to actually try to do this..."</p>
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<p><img src="ut_map.png" alt="Hand-mapping UT Austin" /></p>
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<p>But I did, and that led me to discovering OpenStreetMap, which it turns out was
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pretty pivotal. (The first version of my campus map was seeded vaguely off an
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official paper map, but mostly I walked around and invented half-assed surveying
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methods on the spot.) Next semester, I joined a freshman research stream with
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somebody who had worked on <a href="http://www.cs.utexas.edu/%7Eaim/">AIM</a>, UT's
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demonstration that autonomous vehicles wouldn't need traffic lights. Everything
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came together, and I started a 3 year journey of building
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<a href="https://github.com/dabreegster/aorta/">AORTA</a>, a traffic simulator for AVs.
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Guided by the research lab, I explored the really bizarre idea of letting AVs
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<a href="http://www.cs.utexas.edu/%7Eaim/papers/ITSC13-dcarlino.pdf">bid to turn lights green sooner</a>
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and micro-tolling all roads to disincentivize congestion. Both of these
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mechanisms would be incredibly unfair to people without the spare cash to back
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up their high value-of-time, but I brushed this off by saying the currency could
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be based on carpooling, EVs, etc.</p>
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<p><img src="aorta.gif" alt="Approximately Orchestrated Routing and Transportation Analyzer" /></p>
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<p>It was great to try research in college; I learned I <em>really</em> dislike munging
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data and compressing my work into 6 pages of conference paper LaTeX. So I moved
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to Seattle to work in industry instead, on something completely unrelated to
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transportation. Lots of things began unravelling for me in Seattle, but one of
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them was biking. In Austin, I had picked up mountain biking, and all but stopped
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driving; it was an amazing place to explore and commute by bike. Seattle was
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different. There were many more cyclists around, but the experience felt more
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stressful, the drivers more aggressive. I had plenty of near-misses. I kept
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commuting by bike, but the joy of it was gone. I started noticing how many cars
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were parked on narrow arterials and wondering why that was a fair use of space.
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I started paying attention to the public discourse around bike infrastructure in
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Seattle and feeling like the conversation was... chaotic.</p>
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<p><img src="manhattan.jpg" alt="Manhattan took walkability seriously" /></p>
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<p>Fast forward to late 2017. This is where I'll omit chunks of the story. I
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visited London, my first experience with a city that took public transit
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seriously. When I returned, lots of latent ideas stopped fermenting and started
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exploding. I threw together a prototype of A/B Street and started the arduous
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process at work of open-sourcing it and applying to a program to let me work it
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on for a few quarters. A few months later, I wound up quitting instead, and
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began to work on A/B Street in earnest.</p>
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