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Surprised to find this on HN this morning! I'm Director of Engineering at UrbanFootprint (https://urbanfootprint.com/ https://urbanfootprint.com/), the company

Surprised to find this on HN this morning! I'm Director of Engineering at UrbanFootprint (https://urbanfootprint.com/ https://urbanfootprint.com/), the company featured in the Fast Company article. We provide data and tools for urban planners to assess and compare the impacts of land use and transportation decisions. A basic use case is a city updating its General Plan, which would start with a forecast of how much population growth is anticipated / needs to be accommodated. A planner then needs to assess where new residents will live, work, shop, and play. Perhaps even more essential, how are people going to travel between all of these activities? Will the new growth be auto-dependent, transit-focused, walkable? Is any of the existing or planned development in hazard areas such as flood of wildfire? What are the energy and water use impacts of the plans? We’re using Python and Postgres/PostGIS on the backend to answer these questions and a React SPA to serve it up and make it interactive in a browser. Also, if you happen to live in California, UrbanFootprint is available for free to your city through our California Civic Program (http://info.urbanfootprint.com/california-civic-program http://info.urbanfootprint.com/california-civic-program) so feel free to nudge them to get in touch ;)

roel_v 8y ago
How many people are you?
matt4077 8y ago
Congrats for the PR successes, and also for turning what I can only assume was a worrying SimCity habit into a career & a tool for good. To expand that SimCity analogy to its breaking point: I've long fantasised a game/simulator crossover that tries to get as close as possible to simulate a city. Down to, say, individual agent's decision to eat out or shop for groceries, and the resulting traffic etc. Is that something you see happening in the (longish-term) future?
- jgibson 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent-based_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent-based_model This is already in common use as far as I'm aware. Its used in the Netherlands to predict electrical grid load based on the number of EVs driving about.
thex10 8y ago
You mention population growth modeling and the linked article here mentioned the tool can’t predict changes in rents... is there any interest in incorporating some sort of lifecycle analysis or dynamic modeling like that here?
petra 8y ago
What about new modes of transportation, like true ride sharing(multiple people in a vehicle , on-demand routes) - can your system simulate that ?
- nkoren 8y ago
  If that's what you're interested in, you might want to check out https://www.podaris.com/ https://www.podaris.com/, which started as a tool for planning autonomous Personal Rapid Transit networks. It now supports conventional modes as well as theoretical systems (hyperloops, etc.) (Disclaimer: I'm the founder. Not meaning to steal UrbanFootprint's thunder, as it looks like a great tool, and it would be great to interoperate with them someday.)
buchmayne 8y ago
I am very interested in this space, how would you describe your product in relation to other land-use models? I'm thinking UrbanSim, PECAS, MapCraft
- jalessio 8y ago
  Today, one of the biggest differentiations between UrbanFootprint and UrbanSim is that I'd call UrbanFootprint a "sketch analysis tool" whereas UrbanSim is, to the best of my understanding, an agent-based simulation tool. For a user, the key differentiator is that in UrbanFootprint you build scenarios with the actual future land use that you envision and we run analyses to provide insight on the relative impacts of those scenarios. So you might build out a few scenarios like “Business as Usual”, “Urban Infill”, and “Transit Oriented Development” and assess the cost/benefit of those different plans. In this use case you are literally “painting” land use onto a map (with the aid of lots of nice faceted filtering, geospatial joins, etc.). In the absolute simplest terms, I like to think of it as “you tell us what and where you want to build and we’ll tell you how that pencils out.” Additionally, we aim to provide numerous high value datasets and analysis modules “out of the box” to lower the bar to entry for many planning tasks. For example, we provide users a normalized nationwide parcel-level land use “canvas” to create projects with. This means you can be up and running with parcel data for most cities in the United States in a few clicks! And for the record, there is absolutely nothing on the technical side that precludes us from doing agent-based simulation -- we just haven’t focused on that yet. I’d personally like to build a feature which allows you to use simulation to produce scenarios as a starting point and then tweak them to your liking. For MapCraft, I'm not up to speed on what it is now capable of. I am familiar with their cofounder’s previous work while at UC Berkeley. This is a good reminder for me to circle back on what MapCraft is up to - thanks! Also, if you’re a customer of theirs I’d love to hear how you think UrbanFootprint compares. I'll have to leave questions about PECAS for someone else on my team as I don't personally have any knowledge/expertise on that one.

roel_v 8y ago

How many people are you?

matt4077 8y ago

Congrats for the PR successes, and also for turning what I can only assume was a worrying SimCity habit into a career & a tool for good. To expand that SimCity analogy to its breaking point: I've long fantasised a game/simulator crossover that tries to get as close as possible to simulate a city. Down to, say, individual agent's decision to eat out or shop for groceries, and the resulting traffic etc. Is that something you see happening in the (longish-term) future?

jgibson 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent-based_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent-based_model This is already in common use as far as I'm aware. Its used in the Netherlands to predict electrical grid load based on the number of EVs driving about.

thex10 8y ago

You mention population growth modeling and the linked article here mentioned the tool can’t predict changes in rents... is there any interest in incorporating some sort of lifecycle analysis or dynamic modeling like that here?

petra 8y ago

What about new modes of transportation, like true ride sharing(multiple people in a vehicle , on-demand routes) - can your system simulate that ?

nkoren 8y ago
If that's what you're interested in, you might want to check out https://www.podaris.com/ https://www.podaris.com/, which started as a tool for planning autonomous Personal Rapid Transit networks. It now supports conventional modes as well as theoretical systems (hyperloops, etc.) (Disclaimer: I'm the founder. Not meaning to steal UrbanFootprint's thunder, as it looks like a great tool, and it would be great to interoperate with them someday.)

buchmayne 8y ago

I am very interested in this space, how would you describe your product in relation to other land-use models? I'm thinking UrbanSim, PECAS, MapCraft

jalessio 8y ago
Today, one of the biggest differentiations between UrbanFootprint and UrbanSim is that I'd call UrbanFootprint a "sketch analysis tool" whereas UrbanSim is, to the best of my understanding, an agent-based simulation tool. For a user, the key differentiator is that in UrbanFootprint you build scenarios with the actual future land use that you envision and we run analyses to provide insight on the relative impacts of those scenarios. So you might build out a few scenarios like “Business as Usual”, “Urban Infill”, and “Transit Oriented Development” and assess the cost/benefit of those different plans. In this use case you are literally “painting” land use onto a map (with the aid of lots of nice faceted filtering, geospatial joins, etc.). In the absolute simplest terms, I like to think of it as “you tell us what and where you want to build and we’ll tell you how that pencils out.” Additionally, we aim to provide numerous high value datasets and analysis modules “out of the box” to lower the bar to entry for many planning tasks. For example, we provide users a normalized nationwide parcel-level land use “canvas” to create projects with. This means you can be up and running with parcel data for most cities in the United States in a few clicks! And for the record, there is absolutely nothing on the technical side that precludes us from doing agent-based simulation -- we just haven’t focused on that yet. I’d personally like to build a feature which allows you to use simulation to produce scenarios as a starting point and then tweak them to your liking. For MapCraft, I'm not up to speed on what it is now capable of. I am familiar with their cofounder’s previous work while at UC Berkeley. This is a good reminder for me to circle back on what MapCraft is up to - thanks! Also, if you’re a customer of theirs I’d love to hear how you think UrbanFootprint compares. I'll have to leave questions about PECAS for someone else on my team as I don't personally have any knowledge/expertise on that one.