SimpleRoute

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  Chicago to Atlanta

Inspiration

Americans tend to drive much more than other countries, and as a result put more CO2 into the air. The alternative is for Americans to use public transportation systems like buses or trains to travel, reducing their overall impact on the environment.

What it does

Given two cities (a starting and ending location) the program maps out the U.S. railway system, and runs an A* algorithm to find the most efficient route between the two

How we built it

Using online information we created a database of railway stations and which cities they correspond to, as well as which stations connect to which other stations. Combining this with the geographical coordinates of each station allowed up to map the entire system across North America.

Challenges

Three out of our four team members are new to programming and hackathons, so finding an efficient way to use everyone's abilities proved to be a challenge.

What's next for SimpleRoute

Using the same fundamental structure, building new databases for different transit systems is the next step, as given the right data this algorithm can find the most efficient path between any two locations. The most likely candidates for the next database would be local bus or metro systems, as the current scope of the programs is very large.

Built With

• python