Carbon calculations
publié leAdd carbon calculations to our itinerary mode.
Context
Cartes is the successor to futur.eco, which inspired the French official carbon calculator of trips and the global French individual climate impact calculator. This latter tool now used by millions is a fork of futur.eco which was forked to cartes.app.
Meanwhile, plane and ferry climate calculators have been added to futur.eco. The latter is the first ever created, with a dedicated open source model, the first written.
We also developed a car trip cost calculator which is now the reference French complete car cost calculator, the others taking only into account fuel and highway.
We'd like to integrate all these calculators to cartes.app's itinerary modes, and once it's properly done, shut down futur.eco.
A significant number of current visitors would then be transferred to cartes.app.
Design
We want to provide a simple interface. The results will be displayed with a background color code representing the allowed climate emissions per person derived from the Paris agreement.
Options will be tipped to users to make the calculation more precise, especially for cars, where € will take a large place. € for trains is out of scope, SNCF declined our proposition to show costs ("too competitive").
⌚️5
laem
Most trip carbon calculators often compare non-realistic options, e.g. train vs plane although no direct train exists (making a x2 on time and km and hence CO2e).
They also do not take into account full journey modes : time and means of transport to go to the airport is often neglected. The idea here would be to compute door-to-door options with open-source carbon calculation algorithms, and be honest about trips where ecological public transport is unavailable.
And avoid greenwashing like some big commercial actors often fall into. Google is an infamous example : they decided one day to lower the account of non-CO2 plane climate footprint, without proper justification. Also, some of their UI decisions make very polluting trips look like planet-saving choices.
⌚️4 Backport futur.eco's car cost calculator to cartes.app