RideGreen

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Inspiration

As a team, we were inspired by the various forms of transportation and their effect on both our finances and our planet. We decided to take information from government studies and the Google Cloud APIs to find the cost and carbon footprint of public transportation, driving, biking and walking.

What it does

After being provided with an origin and a destination, RideGreen shows specific information about each possible method of transportation, including the amount of carbon emissions. More specifically, RideGreen provides information on the duration, cost, carbon output, and distance for each mode. Alongside all of this information, a general outline of relative pollution, cost, and efficiency is given for the user to consider in their choice.

How we built it

RideGreen's backend is built on Node.js and Express, serving first a static html file, then an ejs file in order to show dynamic output (our varying travel results). RideGreen takes the information from the form the user submits, and does two main things with it. First, the Google Maps API is contacted four times, one for each method of transportation. Each of these calls returns essential information on the travel duration, distance, and cost (if it's public transportation). Second, we use the distances traveled by the public transportation and driving alongside reputable government figures on average carbon output to calculate the carbon emissions for public transport and driving.

Challenges we ran into

First, our inability to mix different forms of transportation. We had the idea that it might be the most convenient for our users if they could mix their forms of transportation, i.e. drive their car to the subway station and take the subway from there on out. The issue we ran into is that when contacting the Google API, we must specify only one mode of transportation, and Google returns information applying to only that one mode. This prevents us from providing information about routes with mixed forms of transportation (which would likely be quicker), however the information we show is very accurate.

What's next for RideGreen

RideGreen's ultimate goal is to be an easy and simple solution to help users find a route that fits a combination of their financial and carbon footprint desires. In order to help enhance this process, we would like to implement a system that helps find the best route by combining all four modes of transportation: driving, walking, public and biking. Additionally, to help make the experience more accessible, a future update would be to create a mobile application and Google Home/Amazon Alexa support. Since when people are planning their morning route, it is easier to ask a digital assistant or even get a push notification on a route.

Built With

Submitted to

MadHacks Carbon 2019
- Winner Best Beginner Hack

Created by

I worked on parts of the back end, including making API calls and implementing some of the methods to calculate carbon emissions, travel cost, travel duration, and distance. Coming into this I had very little experience with JavaScript and no experience with APIs, Node, or Express, so I learned a lot about all of those things along the way.

JackFord18 Ford
I worked mainly on the backend, doing the methods to calculate carbon emissions along with other needed information. In order to do so I had to utilize Google's API along with other outside sources to find the necessary information to make the calculations and methods. This was my first time working with an outside API, so it was a very educational learning experience for myself teaching me lots of ways one can utilize outside sources and code to make one's project better and more efficient.

krverheyen Verheyen
Front end development and integration between Node.JS and the front end. All CSS (SCSS) was done from scratch and didn't use any frameworks.

Matthew Moran
I took the lead on the back-end, teaching Kyle and Jack the little I know. We built the server-side code on Node.js and Express, and I helped work on our project's calls to the Google API. I also helped coordinate the motion of information from the front-end to back-end and vice versa.

Ben Zerler