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Making more conscious travel choices

9 comments

travel-comparer
Comparison of a short distance in Lund.

Ever wondered what difference it makes if you go by bike or by car to work? Now the municipality of Lund in southern Sweden has launched a service which will provide its inhabitants with good arguments to think their transportation choices over. The travel comparer (only in Swedish, though) lets you point out departure and arrival addresses and then calculates how long it would take you to get there by walking, cycling, by car or by bus. Not only that, it also calculates the price of the trip, how much CO2 it will emit – alternatively how many calories it will burn, if you are using your own muscles as fuel.

Everyone can contribute

One nice thing about it is that it uses OpenStreetMap, which is like a global Wikipedia for maps. The idea is everyone who lives in the area and uses the roads can share their best routes. One of the developers of the service says in a press release that it took just a few hours after the launching of the site before someone had added a new route.

The bike won

In the example above, where I just chose to go from a random spot to the central station in Lund, you can see that the fastest alternative is actually to go by bike (The column at the top is time, after that distance, price/trip, price/year, CO2 emissions/trip, CO2 emissions/year, and calories.)
As someone has pointed out, the calculations do not take into account for example steep hills, which would make cycling a bit harder. But maybe the OpenStreetMap will have functions for that as well, in time.

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

February 18, 2010

  • Pol

    This is a nice comparision. The problem with bikes is that you sweat and dirt your clothes lot more, which is especially a problem if you have to arrive clean, so you have to take shower and wash more frequently. The bad weather and unapropriate street infrastructure for safe biking can also be a problem and hilly landscape like in my town is quite attractive but ads sweat. Of course everybody would tolerate this more when this would be more common thing. … What about roller skates ?

  • Sara

    Of course it depends on weather conditions and the topography of a place, but when I go by bike I usually take it rather easy, so I wouldn’t say I sweat a lot. And when it rains i I wear waterproof clothes over my other clothes to protect them. I have personally never tried roller skates, but maybe it is a good idea, at least they don’t have to be locked!

  • Pol

    It appears the speed has also something to do with street infrastructure. When you find yourself on an open street with cars, it seems as going on a bike very slow and unstable under 20 km/h, but in a narrower and more cooler bike or walkways zones 10 -15 km/h seems pretty enough. Neccesity of locking bikes is really a setback, even when only a minority of people would try to steal it.

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