Project Description
netzero.waka.app allows you to enter your journey to automatically find the best public transport, driving, and active travel options for your trip. You can see how each trip stacks up in terms of time, cost, and carbon emissions. There are customisation options to allow citizens to travel across the city in the most sustainable way which suits their needs and journey. For example, whether they are travelling off-peak with 3 people or if they are a fast walker. These options will be updated in real time, and help people make a conscious decision.
Future updates planned include:
Having a personal profile with goals, weekly, monthly and annual progress towards net zero carbon emissions
Daily log in incentives with free trees if you log in for a week
Personalised tree details around what you have planted
Social features to compete with friends and track progress
Collective impact features based around New Zealand’s climate change goals e.g. working together to reduce/offset carbon emissions
Tips, tricks and encouragements to help you continue on reducing your carbon footprint journey
More options for offsetting carbon emissions including everyday life, home chores and dietary options.
Data Story
Trying to minimise your carbon footprint can be confusing. Even for a simple decision like how best to get from A to B. Which route do you take? Which mode of transport? Using what type of vehicle? Running on which fuel? All of these factors influence not only the carbon footprint of your journey, but also the associated cost and time.
Our goal was to use the available data to help take the guess work out for users:
We started with the Auckland Transport APIs to generate routes options between destinations for walking, biking, driving, and public transport. From the routes we determined the distance for each.
The Carbon Footprint Travel Modes data sourced from OurWorldInData gave us a core set of vehicle types, with their average CO2 emissions per km.
We also wanted to estimate to cost of travel for the user. The Auckland Transport API provided this for public transport, but to estimate this for private transport we needed an indication of the amount of fuel used per km first. The RightCar site gave us conversion factors for translating CO2 emissions back into literage for petrol and diesel. And the EV Running Cost Calculator allowed us to do similar for electric and hybrid vehicles. Translating fuel volume into cost is currently using default costs per fuel type. However, a future feature would be to link the price of petrol and diesel to the pricewatch.co.nz site.