TransportTerra

Inspiration

One of the biggest impacts of Covid-19 on the environment is the slowing down of the airline industry. We know that once we get back to our old habits, this impact won’t last. But what is there a way to make consumers aware of the impact of their flights, and allow them to contribute to planting trees in a way that makes their trip carbon neutral?

What it does

TransportTerra takes a user's flight details (Origin and destination) and returns fossil fuel emissions for the more efficient path of the flight, as well as an approximate cost and additional cost to plant trees to make the flight carbon neutral.

How We built it

Step One: Generate optimal flight path

Using Data from the US Department of Transportation we had the mapping of all the different flights going to and from 300 different cities. We used python to calculate the flight path that goes through the smallest distance.

Step Two: Calculate carbon emissions

Using distance from the flight path and number of passengers in the current flight we calculated the total emissions of the flight

Step Three: Calculate estimated cost including carbon offset cost

First, we estimated the amount the trip would cost, based on distance and number of passengers. Then using the amount of emissions, we counted the cost it would take the plant trees to make the trip carbon neutral

Step Four: Give the user their Path, Emissions, and Cost We have a map that mops a user's journey, as well as the ability to return emissions and costs to the user after their trip.

Challenges

We ran into a couple of challenges along the way, the biggest of which was trying to get the python script hooked to the UI which was written in HTML. Since we weren’t sure of the best way to get this done, we ended up trying a myriad of ways, from creating a project in node js, to hooking up the HTML to javascript, to trying to write a json file to using flask in python, they all came up with their respective error. In the end, we settled for using a python command-line interface, but many of us are hoping to continue to learn about web interfaces

We also worked a little on web scraping, but various challenges made it a lot easier for us to use a dataset for the current iteration of the project.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

We are proud of our working product, as we can go from one end of the project to another fairly well, and it is functional. We also like our code for getting the data from a dataset.

What We learned

We learned a lot about working in a team and splitting tasks, as well as web scraping, getting data from datasets, and all sorts of web interfaces and the costs of emissions and how they relate to flying.

What's next for TransportTerra

Using web scraping to get costs from websites would allow us to estimate costs better, and we would also want to have more cities and trips into our dataset, though the 3000 we had worked fairly well.

Built With

• html
• python