Why 3DStreet? Vision & Mission
Vision: Design the future
Mission: Provide tools to empower anyone to rapidly prototype visions to improve our shared environment, starting with streets.
Founding and Evolution
3DStreet was created by Kieran Farr in 2017 as a solution to his own challenges advocate for street safety improvements with local community organizations in San Francisco. Volunteers faced challenges collaborating with community members, elected officials, and agency staff regarding complex street change proposals which led to miscommunication and delay. Streetmix was helpful for initial rapid prototyping but limited to cross-sections, while civil engineering tools like AutoCAD were too complicated for most users. 3DStreet fills this gap in-between Streetmix and AutoCAD allowing for rapid prototyping to evaluate technical feasibility, facilitate political support, and secure streetscape project funding, prior to entering a detailed engineering design stage.
Key Contributors
The majority of 3DStreet's day-to-day development and operation is led by Kieran Farr, the founder and lead developer, with significant community contributions as an open-source project.
Fernando Serrano, Kevin Ngo, and Diego Marcos have been longtime contributors to the A-Frame Web 3D Graphics Library and the A-Frame Inspector, upon which 3DStreet was based.
In addition to the above, the following individuals have contributed to 3DStreet-specific customizations over the years: Vincent Fretin, Alexander Goryushkin, Rahul Gupta, Sam Rothstein, Gnanasai Reddy, and more.
Ecosystem
We created 3DStreet to be part of a wider ecosystem of applications making street planning and design and accessible to users of diverse abilities. These tools are (or should be) interoperable, and need not be all made by one organization. Other tools include Streetmix, A/B Street, StreetPlan, and Open Street Map.
References
[^1] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffic-injuries
[^2] https://nacto.org/publication/urban-street-design-guide/