Blyft

An ML approach with to optimize bus routes in Calgary through crowd-sourced data

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Inspiration

In 2018, transportation accounted for nearly 1.5 billion metric tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions in North America alone. Some estimates greenhouse gases, particularly from vehicle emissions, accounts for over 250000 preventable deaths worldwide. Another inspiration is that people believe that a car is a necessity and that without one a person can not truly get to a destination with ease. People believe that public transit and the routes they provide do not truely accommodate for people

What it does

Blyft aims to improve the efficiency of municipal bus routes with machine learning. In particular, K-mean clustering is used to determine groups of population hot spots around the city. Citizens can enter their starting location, end location, and their results will be added to our database. Through the data once more then 30 citizens have all entered similar start and end locations, are program checks if an existing route could be modified to help accommodate these people and if not then a new route will be created and proposed to the City of Calgary.

How we built it

We built this app using Express.js and SKlearn

Challenges we ran into

Our main challenge was to determine the optimal way to organize routes from a set of nodes. This involved serious investment of time looking into graph theory that was a very challenging task to overcome

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud that we managed to visualize the data using Google Maps which took serious effort and multiple restarts to display what we wanted, how we wanted.

What we learned

We learned about the many challenges that comes along with using API's such as google maps. Also how to deal with difficult situations in a timely manner

What's next for Blyft

We wish to propose our system to the residents of the City of Calgary and allow them to put in the routes they desire and through this help developer and create and more efficient routes that can accommodate a great amount of people. Once we have created these routes we plan to propose these to the city of Calgary in hopes of them implementing our routes and help improve the transit system.

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