iMove

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Inspiration

London is crowned as the city with the worst congestion every year. London commuters, on average, waste 90 minutes of their life a day commuting through the heavy traffic. In addition, commuting not only is one of the biggest contributors to climate change, but it also creates a sedentary lifestyle that increases one’s risk for obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and even premature death. People are becoming more environment and health-consensus and as a result, they changing their behavior more and more to reduce their carbon footprint and to curb climate change that poses an existential threat to humanity. More people are, for example, becoming vegans or vegetarians to reduce their meat consumption. Research from INRIX indicates that people are willing to use public transport if affordable and reliable options become available. We, hence, have devised a service to cluster users based on their origin, their destination and the distance that they want to walk to their destination. Based on these inputs, the service determines the shortest path to the drops-off location such that the user can walk the pre-defined distance to the destination. The mass-adoption of our service can reduce traffic congestion and carbon footprint and increase the physical activity of the individual, reversing the effects of a sedentary lifestyle.

What it does

The product defines custom bus routes in order to maximize the efficiency and convenience of public transport and thus, reducing the number of cars in traffic. In its current phase, the users register on the platform and specify their home address and their work address, which can be modified after logging in, after pressing on the "show route", the pick-up and drop-off locations, along with the whole path of this user will be shown depending on the nearby users. The software could also recommend increasing the walk distance for a certain discount on the ticket and will provide metrics to each user with how much CO2 they have saved, how much has the air quality improved in the local area and the health benefits of walking. In its prototype phase, the product uses a web page to define the usual commute of a person through user input, this could be changed to a mobile app that can request the location details from the Google account of the user and use Google's inference of the home and work addresses. After defining the list of where the users need to be and where they are, the product computes custom bus routes depending on the demand and the lists of pick-up and drop-off points using our algorithm and google map's pathfinding API.

How we built it

In the current prototype phase, the software is in the shape of a web application written in Python using Flask and a bunch of related packages (Flask-SQLAlchemy, Flask-GoogleMaps, Flask-Login, etc). After pressing on the "show route" button, our algorithm will compute pick-up and drop-off locations by leveraging between the distance that a bus has to travel and the distance users have to travel to the pick-up location

Challenges we ran into

This is quite a long list: definitely, the hardest thing is the algorithm that computes the pick-up and drop-off locations as it needs to take account of many things (how many people are going in the same direction, physical condition of each user, different times of arrival, etc). Then, there are many functionalities that could motivate people to use our product, but which are harder to quantify: air quality improvement, user-health improvement, company ESG improvement (by reducing the employees CO2 fingerprint while commuting to work)