Where urban transportation is concerned, the world’s becoming increasingly multimodal. People don’t strictly stick to public buses and taxicabs any longer, if they ever did to begin with — according to a 2013 study by the American Public Transportation Association (APTA), nearly 70 percent of millennials use a combination of car-sharing, bike-sharing, walking, subways, and light rail to get from place to place.
The diversity in transit is forcing cities to adapt their infrastructure, and over 300 have tapped San Francisco startup Remix‘s cloud-based platform to help inform their decisions. To further build out said platform and bring on new government partners, Remix has raised $ 15 million in series B financing led by Energy Impact Partners, it revealed today. That follows on the heels of a $ 10 million series A in May 2017, bringing the company’s total venture capital raised to $ 27 million.
“We started with an aspiration to make public transportation more efficient and effective, and we’re proud of the success more than 300 cities have had using the Remix platform to date,” said COO Tiffany Chu, who cofounded Remix with fellow Code for America members Dan Getelman, Danny Whalen, and Sam Hashemi in 2014. “Now, cities have asked for support managing the proliferation of private mobility options, including ridesharing, dockless bikes, escooters, and eventually autonomous vehicles. We expanded the Remix platform to do that, so cities can take a holistic approach to improving transportation policy, routes, and infrastructure.”
Above: Remix’s planning tools.
Remix’s solution provides transportation agencies with a wealth of data both public and proprietary — including stats on collisions, curb and street density, demographics, ridership, and employment — and a drag-and-drop, cross-sectional interface planners can use to explore routes that comply with local policy requirements. It calculates the buildout costs of those routes automatically, and identifies which residential and commercial pockets they would (or wouldn’t) favor in the long run. Moreover, it exposes both historical and real-time trends, like how many scooters are on the street at any given time and the ways in which new mobility is affecting first- and last-mile community connections.
Auckland, New Zeland’s department of transportation says Remix’s dashboard reduced planning time by 92 percent during a recent transport network redesign, and King County Metro claims it shaved over a year off of its 2040 transit plan.
Another satisfied customer? The Honolulu Department of Transportation. “Together with Remix, we are designing the next-generation ‘Honolulu 2.0,’ filled with integrated multimodal options centered around our already robust TheBus network and our soon-to-open rail line,” said deputy director of DoT services Jon Nouchi. “Remix ensures we have well-planned, innovatively envisioned, and smartly engineered solutions implemented for the benefit of our residents and visitors alike.”
