MIT researchers unveiled something earlier this month that will please toddlers and serious urban planners alike. It’s a model of Dudley Square—a neighborhood in the greater Boston area—about the size of a kitchen table. The roads, sidewalks, bus stations, and buildings are all made out of Lego blocks. Wee Lego figures represent pedestrians. Laid over it all is a computer-generated projection of the actual neighborhood, filling in the details of current green space and traffic in Dudley Square.

Bus rapid transit placement at the neighborhood-scale CityScope model
Bus rapid transit placement at the neighborhood-scale CityScope model - The Mobility Futures Collaborative in the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) and the Changing Places group at the MIT Media Lab have developed new interactive tools aimed to better communicate the possible impacts of new transit systems. The Media Lab and DUSP have partnered with the Barr Foundation to test these tools in a series of community engagement workshops to examine the impacts of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) systems in greater Boston. These tools include the CityScope — an interactive platform that utilizes physical models (built from LEGO bricks) and 3-D projection — to enable community members to engage in neighborhood and street-level decisions including alternative bus corridor designs and station-level variations (such as pre-pay boarding). The second tool,CoAXs is a new interactive platform for collaborative transit planning that builds on open-source urban analytics tools such as Conveyal Transport Analyst. This set of new tools is designed to work in concert to bring key stakeholders from the community, non-governmental organizations, government, and planners to engage in constructive discussion, and to encourage participation through new technology. By developing an understanding of BRT concepts, trade-offs, and impacts, users can also use the tools to design their own proposals, and thus contribute their ideas to future scenario planning. Finally, these tools intend to help build consensus through data-driven interactions and dialogue. A series of public workshops that utilize these new tools, in collaboration with the Barr Foundation, will be held this month to explore the impacts of different BRT scenarios in Boston based on the Greater Boston Bus Rapid Transit Study Group. The Roxbury Innovation Centeris partnering with MIT to host the events and Nuestra Comunidad is providing feedback on tools, workshop facilitation, and outreach support. © Ariel Noyman/MIT Media Lab

The project is a collaboration between the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning, the Changing Places group at the MIT Media Lab, and the Barr Foundation, all of whom are are using the new tool to test how bus-rapid transit systems could affect the city.The test includes three components, each representing the city ofBoston on a different scale.There’s the Lego model of Dudley Square, another 3-D model (also made of Legos) of a Boston street, and a touchscreen interface to illustrate the potential effects of different plans on a regional scale—such as how changes to public transit might affect people’s access to jobs.

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The aim is to make the urban planning process more transparent by getting everyone involved—not just experts like Zegras. “Part of our idea with introducing these types of tools is to break away from the technocratic model of planning,” he says. “So we’ve try to make a very initial foray into opening up those processes a bit more.”