Tool to create heatmaps of public transport quality by assessing travel times (sustainability) #417
Description
Project description
The transportation sector is directly and indirectly responsible for a very large share of global greenhouse gas emissions. Reducing its emissions is a key main way of climate change mitigation. Using public transport instead of cars is one main way individual people and regions or societies can do so. However, there is little tracking and comparable data of real-world public transport quality.
What is needed is a free software that can show the real-world public transport quality by evaluating travel-times of public transport to destination locations when starting from places within a region. The region is a tile in some kind of grid of the map. It would for example be pretty red if it takes 3 hours to go to nearby places with bus, train, etc reachable by car in 30 minutes and pretty green if the travel time is about equal / or if it's a good distance to PT-travel-time ratio.
This is a measure that combines public transport coverage (whether places are realistically reachable at all with PT) as well as public transport speed (low if you need to transfer often and it's low-speed buses instead of highspeed rail). It combines both because if public transport doesn't go to a place picked as destination point, you'd have to walk and that drastically increase travel time for the given route.
I think such a tool is needed and could have major real-world positive impact and help substantially with climate change mitigation and sustainability in general. I think I first mentioned it in this problem-solving map "One could develop a system that checks travel times (incl walking) to nearby places to assess PT quality and then create a map & tables"
For the details:
- The map would be partitioned in a gridlike way and tiles could be smaller for cities than for rural areas.
- Then the tool would pick a random starting location which probably best are inhabited places.
- Then the tool would pick a set of many destination points; maybe somewhat random and maybe somewhat reasonable destination points (e.g. both or two different modes to run the tool) like some apartment building address or a lake. Some would be nearby and some a bit further away (details would need to be worked out).
- Then it would use some API to get travel times of public transport to that place (which of course assumes those connections are reliable and not be delayed) – I don't know if Google Maps can be used for that which usually does display travel times and usually fairly accurately; Öffi is an open source app that could be used for that and there's probably more that could be named in the comments.
- So for example, it picked 10 starting points in a grid region tile and 300 destination points in other tiles. It got various travel times (including time needed for walking per route) and combines this with the distance.
- Put simply, if the travel time to distance is large it would make the tile redder and otherwise greener or whatever the colors-scheme is. There usually can't really be a very green tile right next to a very red one, it's a heatmap where colors usually change gradually over the map.
- Later versions could experiment with various things like prioritizing places people likely would like to go to such as nearby cities or recreational areas etc.
Relevant Technology
- TravelTime API
- Google Distance Matrix API
- Heat maps with OpenStreetMap
- [please add more]
Complexity and required time
Complexity
- Beginner - This project requires no or little prior knowledge of the technolog(y|ies) specified to contribute to the project
- Intermediate - The user should have some prior knowledge of the technolog(y|ies) to the point where they know how to use it, but not necessarily all the nooks and crannies of the technology
- Advanced - The project requires the user to have a good understanding of all components of the project to contribute
Required time (ETA)
- Little work - A couple of days
- Medium work - A week or two
- Much work - The project will take more than a couple of weeks and serious planning is required
Categories
- Mobile app
- IoT
- Web app
- Frontend/UI
- AI/ML
- APIs/Backend
- Voice Assistant
- Developer Tooling
- Extension/Plugin/Add-On
- Design/UX
- AR/VR
- Bots
- Security
- Blockchain
- Futuristic Tech/Something Unique