Bus N Bike

Inspiration

We love using POGOH bikes, but unfortunately, the bike racks can often be empty. We wanted a way to improve this incredible form of public transportation for everyone. Additionally, with increasing concerns about global warming, we wanted to do something that could improve the sustainability of not only our city, but every city across the world.

What it does

Our project analyzes data from bus stops and bike racks with Gemini API. The two ways that it comes up with new bike rack locations include analyzing popular bus stops without a nearby bike rack and measuring frequently used bike racks. It gives suggestions shown on the website.

How we built it

We used Python for the backend to generate viewable graphs that improve the observability of the data with libraries such as pandas and seaborn. Then, we leveraged Gemini API to analyze the data and CSV files to pass the data to the React frontend.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest technical challenges were with React and Gemini API. As a novice team, we spent a great deal of time trying to figure out how to implement Google Maps API with markers in React, when we finally found a discrepancy between the compatible versions of React and Google Maps API. Additionally, it was a challenge learning the differences between Gemini API and the actual Gemini online.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The Google Maps API is a powerful and thus sometimes complicated API to use. Finally seeing the image of the map show up on our website was a huge wave of relief! Additionally, we are very proud of this idea as a whole as we all feel a connection to it.

What's next

Our version here is a demo of what this could become. While it seems like a POGOH-exclusive application, our product is massively scalable and a genuine solution for medium-sized cities like Pittsburgh to implement new public transportation without access to enough funds for a subway system. We would like to expand our reach for this project to accept user's data files for buses and bikes for any city. Additionally, refining the formula for Gemini API would make it even stronger.