ReStreet was founded by three friends interested in reshaping the future of streets. The idea began when two professors and avid cyclists, William (Billy) Riggs and Michael R. Boswell began talking about ways to better envision the future of streets in their hometown of San Luis Obispo, CA. Enlisting their friend Ryder Ross, the team built on the open source Code for America tool Streetmix to deploy their beta tool for a public visioning project. After presenting the project at the 2016 Code for America Summit and documenting it in a journal article the current version of ReStreet was born.