Siqi Zhu: Input / Output

2014 → 2015

Go Boston 2030

Client

City of Boston (work done at Utile)

Filed under

Urban development
Mobility
Data visualization

As lead designer at Utile, I worked with a team led by Boston Transportation Department to develop Go Boston 2030, the city's 20-year strategic mobility plan.

Making sense of urban mobility through data

The plan was widely lauded for its innovative use of data to map Boston's mobility challenges and elucidate the complex relationship between urban mobility and issues of housing, jobs and economic development, and racial equity. I led the data analysis effort and developed digital tools that allowed planning professionals to visually explore the resulting insights.

walk score — Walkability as a luxury amenity: how car-dependent one is in Boston is very much related to one's socio-economic status, which highlights equity as a key driver of future mobility planning (data courtesy of Walkscore)

job distribution — While white collar jobs (blue and green) are concentrated in areas well-served by hub-and-spoke transit systems, blue collar jobs (red) are more spread across the urban periphery, imposing additional cost burdens on workers who need to get to them

Building insights with the community

I translated learnings from the data analysis effort into engaging visualizations for the public, creating a forum in which a city-wide community can debate mobility issues and collectively chart a path forward.

commute time — Example of public-facing visualization, highlighting the relationship between one's commute and issues of job accessibility and economic opportunity

: input / output :

Go Boston 2030

Making sense of urban mobility through data

Building insights with the community