Greenpath

Landing page
First page
Origin and destination selected
Route selected

Inspiration

Google maps is something people use everyday and it hosts a myriad of information when selecting a route from Point A to Point B. Everyday people drive or use public transport to get around, but most people don't know how much impact they have on their environment and we wanted to fix that.

What it does

Greenpath allows you to find out the impact you have on the environment every time you travel. Similar to Google Maps, you can input your origin location and destination and it outputs a set of routes you can take. Greenpath also provides the total amount of carbon emissions each route would end up creating. It will allow commuters to make an environmentally conscious decision when traveling.

How we built it

Greenpath is a web application that has multiple components running. We used Figma to prototype our design. In the backend, we use Java and Spring Boot to communicate between the server and the client. Routes were creating using the Google Map Directions API are used to calculate the total emissions for a route. The data is sent to the frontend which uses React.js and Javascript to display maps and routes with Google's Map API.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges is learning all technologies we used in the project. As a team, we do not have much experience with web app development. Spring, React, and Javascript were fairly new to all of us. The Google Maps API's were also a challenged to work with.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our Map and Directions display. It was the most challenging portion of the project and in the end it turned into aesthetically pleasing product. Managing to learn new technologies and applying them in 48 hours is another accomplishment we are proud of. Making the application functional at all is something we are also proud of.

What we learned

We learned the fundamentals of web application development. The multiple frameworks we used, along with a couple of new languages. We also learned how to use various Google Map API's.

What's next for Greenpath

Currently Greenpath uses average values from each travel method to calculate carbon emissions (g/km), in the future we wish to get more accurate values for specific vehicles, and transportation methods. We would also like to add preferences, so the user can decide how environmentally conscious they want to be. We would also like to implement the ability to generate the most efficient route by combining various travel method routes.