GreenPath

Inspiration

Motor vehicle emissions are one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. In 2020, the year where COVID-19 was spreading and no one was leaving their homes, motor vehicles were still the largest source of New Jersey’s emissions, over a third of the state’s total. Climate change will impact Earth and prevent future generations from even living on this planet if we do not help stop it, and motor vehicle emissions can be easily prevented through public transport. In fact, according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, "Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from transportation account for about 28 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, making it the largest contributor of U.S. GHG emissions. Between 1990 and 2022, GHG emissions in the transportation sector increased more in absolute terms than any other sector.” In light of this, we created GreenPath, an app that makes public transportation easy.

What it does

GreenPath lets users travel on the greener path, allowing them to easily identify public transportation services near them, including buses and trains. Users can input their location to find train stations near them. After this, GreenPath will bring the user to a page where they can view public vehicles traveling to their destination, as well as their timetables. It aims to help ameliorate the climate change crisis, which is constantly worsening. By increasing public transportation usage, and reducing carbon emissions released from excessive vehicles, GreenPath is working towards a cleaner planet in the future, while helping communities thrive and succeed.

How we built it

We built the app using Flask and Python, and designed the pages using HTML and CSS (specifically Bootstrap).

Challenges we ran into

Our team at GreenPath faced many obstacles since we did not have a clear idea while coming in. We are all very passionate regarding preventing pollution and climate change, especially through motor vehicles, since we carpool together very often, and aim to reduce carbon emissions released. We were originally planning to create a carpool service app, however, we expanded that idea to include other forms of public transport. Additionally, we ran into programming issues, as we are all beginner-level programmers. Embedding the map with locations was the hardest part, as we were unaware how to do so before we created a database to show locations from. However, our greatest difficulty, was to find an API with public transportation. We were unable to find one in New Jersey, so we tried to use a csv with local data, however, Flask would keep crashing as we could not limit the location. As a result, we found an API with locations in all of Germany, which could help us limit the map’s locations displayed and show timetables for all the train stations. With this, our app was successful. In the future, we will expand our app from Germany to other locations, especially communities more local to us such as Bridgewater, and across the United States.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

We are very proud of finding an API in Germany with train station locations and timetables, as we tried to code this project without an API originally, and it did not work. With this, we could sort stations by their name, show arrival and departure times, and prevent Flask from crashing. This was probably our single greatest achievement, and was a creative, and pivotal idea that allowed for the ideal function of our app.

What we learned

We learned that embedding a map is extremely difficult without a Google Maps API key. We also learned that we should have gotten the NJ Transit API in advance before the Hackathon, as 1-2 business days were required, which is something we will certainly do in the future. Moreover, we learned the importance of debugging, as it was a critical aspect towards our program.

What’s next for GreenPath

We plan to further expand the potential of GreenPath, making it more diverse, widespread, and effective. In the future, we can input more data, to get a better comprehension of different locations, and the needs of people. Additionally, we can ask the user for their preferred form of transportation, and use this information to keep our experience consistent. Moreover, we can pursue a variety of clean transportation methods, by partnering with electric vehicle companies to better GreenPath. We also plan to make GreenPath more applicable to our local NJ and American communities, by receiving data closer to what we need, instead of in Germany.