A Distanced Route

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Inspiration

Out of groceries at home, my mom exclaimed to me that she was going to go to the supermarket at 12 midnight to prevent being too close to other people. Which lead me to wonder if that was really the best time to go.

With the coronavirus pandemic, everyone has been extra vigilant about keeping away from one another to prevent the spread. While most of us do our best to stay self quarantined at home, many of us will find ourselves with obligations that require to leave home.

When we have to make these trips questions tend to pop up such as:

What are the best times to go
If I already have time, how busy can I expect things to be during my trip?

My site aims to answer these questions.

What it does

My project is a Proof of Concept. By entering an origin and destination address, my site displays various routes the user can take. But more importantly, the site displays a heat map that makes it easier to see just how busy a trip will be at a certain time.

How I built it

Client: React, with custom animations, UI experience and components Backend: initially built with Python and Flask, but ended up creating a mock service for a presentable product Data is driven by Google Maps API

Challenges I ran into

Google API doesn't supply the popularity data that they have on their servers through their API so I resorted to a third-party library which in turn wasn't comprehensive enough. As a result, despite having spent a lot of effort on a back end, for the sake of a presentable product, I had to create a realistic mock service.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

While there seemed to be blockers at every corner of my developmental process, I managed to end up with a POC that had embodied what I originally envisioned within the 4 afternoons of working on it. Even though I ended up using a mock service instead of actual Google's actual API, I structured the app around the same data models. In the future, if Google should provide popularity data with its API, this website should easily be able to extend to accommodate it.