Designing a Dashboard Visualization Tool for Urban Planners to Assess the Completeness of Streets

This paper presents a design study for a novel interactive web-based visualization tool that utilizes a “Complete Streets” model to support urban planners and engineers to design streets in urban areas more effectively. The proposed tool integrates a map and a dashboard view, where streets are analyzed and scored based on their overall completeness through six parameters of service; automobile, public transit, goods vehicles, environment, pedestrians and cyclists. In the map view, planners can assess streets based on their location, type and form and perform comparisons between multiple streets. In the dashboard view, planners can tweak a comprehensive set of instructions within each of the six parameters and view the effects of their changes in real time for both overall completeness and across parameters. Planners can also save versions to revisit and tweak them whenever necessary and may also download their dashboard data in different formats. We proposed that planners will be able to assess the completeness of existing streets in their current state and create multiple street prototypes exploring different scenarios and combinations virtually, instantaneously, minimizing costly pilots and prototypes. Future iterations will also promote collaboration and sharing across dashboards.