Going Green: Saving Money and the Earth

Inspiration

Being students at the University of Virginia, we have seen first-hand how local roads commonly experience traffic congestion as a result of increased foot traffic between classes. We realized that commuters of all sorts may not be aware of how their choice of transportation is affecting the environment. We wanted to create a program to promote sustainable commuting practices.

What it does

When the user inputs two points (their current location and their desired destination), our program calculates the distance between the two, and produces estimates of green house gas emissions for various types of possible transportation. It also includes differences in monetary cost.

How we built it

We decided to code our program using Python. In order to allow the user to input locations based on common names (such as airport names instead of specific addresses), we used the Nominatim API. We then looked up the average emissions factors of gas cars, electric cars, busses, and bikes for common greenhouse gases (CO2, NOx, and PM2.5). For these same forms of transportation, we also researched average costs per mile. Using these factors, our program produces its results.

Challenges we ran into

One challenge was that the members of our group are most proficient in Java, but we took this as a great opportunity to start learning more about Python. Because of this, there was an overarching difficulty of coding the project itself. We also had to determine the best way to take in user input. Should we ask for specific addresses to make more direct measurements, or are we fine with generalizing locations? We decided on the latter to make it more user-friendly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The thing we are most proud of is taking an API we had no previous knowledge of and integrating it using a coding language that we didn't have that much experience with.

What we learned

We learned that gas car emissions produce significantly more greenhouse gasses than any of the other modes of transportation. This is especially concerning given they are by far the most commonly used.

What's next for Going Green: Saving Money and the Earth

In order to expand the scope of this project, we would like to try and find ways to make more accurate measurements, such as using road mapping API from Google Maps to account for non-straight line paths. We could also try to incorporate some elements to account for individual dispersed impact due to public transportation, particularly for busses.

Built With

• github
• intellij-idea
• nominatim
• python