WindWalk | Devpost

Inspiration

State Street in Chicago's loop has about 1.5 million pedestrians every week. For about 6 weeks a year, people are walking all over Chicago in extreme weather. The weather ranges from extremely freezing, windy, or both. Wind chills can hit -50F and the canyon of skyscrapers create funnel gusts at 30+ mph making it more dangerous than a block right next to it.

The Chicago Pedway is 5 miles of underground tunnels, skyways, and concourses across 40+ city blocks. It is a very underused public infrastructure in Chicago. There is no app to navigate through it and no tool that tells you if it is worth going under. As students who found the walking in the loop problematic when the weather is extreme, we believe this would be perfect to solve our issues.

What it does

Weather-aware pedestrian routing for Chicago's Loop. WindWalk helps you find the warmest, most comfortable walking route between two points, prioritizing Chicago's underground Pedway system and street-level paths that minimize wind exposure.

How we built it

We split up our group into 6 parallel feature branches and built each layer simultaneously. The backend is Python and we modeled the Pedway as a navigable graph with 40+ and 50+ edges. We also worked on pulling live weather data for the wind exposure and implemented a hybrid routing algorithm merging underground and surface mapping. The frontend is a React native/Expo app with an interactive map powered by react native maps and added a search panel with suggestions in the Loop.

Challenges we ran into

At the start of the hackathon we had a completely different idea and four hours in we changed our idea to the pedway. This created some internal conflict from the stress we felt from hitting a low point. But because of this we were able to communicate better and built up from there with our new idea. The navigation was one challenge we ran into because the pedway has no public API, no clean dataset, and is a static map. We installed MapBox for the pedway mapping and networks. It is difficult to work with an infrastructure no one has worked with. Lastly, it was difficult to be synced up as a team. Pushing code simultaneously was creating constant merge conflicts. This is a common problem that was not too difficult to overcome, but was a nuisance.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We created something undone before which was very unique and a huge accomplishments for us all. Our app will transform the daily lives of citizens walking through Chicago.

What we learned

This is all of our first hackathons and it was nerve wracking to get started. We all did not know what tools to use nor how to work together. As we started losing time we were able to get focused and learn on the spot. The speakers mentioned AI usage, so after research we discovered cursor and learned how to use the software and prompt the agent. We believe we built better teamwork skills, communication skills, and technical skills as we coded through the night.