Calculate the carbon impact of your travels with Dopplr
On a cold winter evening in 2006, the founders-to-be of Dopplr got together in a West London pub to talk about an idea for a new kind of travel website. After much excited discussion about features and ways of working, Matt Jones agreed to participate on one condition: that whatever we made would give travellers a way to understand the carbon impact of their travels.
Today, serendipitously on Earth Day 2008, we’re launching a carbon calculator for your trips. Working with AMEE (”The World’s Energy Meter”) we can automatically build a travel carbon profile for you. Because AMEE are an impartial platform who work with many organisations that collect data or propose solutions, this means that you’ll be able to eventually reuse this profile with other services.
My 2008 carbon calendar looks like this:
Of course, the mode of transport you choose for your trips makes all the difference to their carbon impact. That means an upgrade to our trip form, which now lets you specify how you’re travelling:
Now here’s Matt Jones to give his take on why this matters so much:
One of the aspects of creating social tools that fascinates me is the ability to make the invisible visible, and what effect surfacing these patterns then has on us as individuals and groups.
For a while there have been carbon calculators on airline websites and environmentalist websites, but generally they have been about directly showing the impact of an individual action, rather than the patterns and trends influencing the actions in the first place.
That’s why I thought it was an essential component of from the start of Dopplr as a social tool for intelligent travellers to optimise their path through the world - and I’m delighted the beginnings of this are here now. Particular props to Boris and Tom for pulling off the design, which I’m pleased as punch with.
It’s a first step, and as with everything we do part of the bigger, beautiful jigsaw of the web. As MattB’s said it’s plugged into AMEE, and you might be already be subscribed to things like WorldChanging or EdenBee that can help you decide what to do about it.
It’s not enforcing any particular course of action - it’s the weighing scales, not the diet.
What we all do with this information is up to us.
Discovered this feature today. Neat!
A few flaws which make the calculations less accurate, though:
- No way to account for connecting travel (assumes the shortest path between two points)
- No way to indicate travel by bus (some of us actually do!)
- No way to indicate shared car trips (calculates per car, not per traveler)
- No way to indicate mixed-mode travel (e.g. a train then a bus)
- No way to indicate one-way travel (e.g. I flew from A to B, took a train to C, then flew back from C to A — currently Dopplr indicates that I flew from A to B, took a train from B to C, and took a train from C to A — but that means I went home twice ;)
I understand that it’s an estimation, though, and that you’re plugging into another service, so you can only pass data in their format. It’d be great to be a bit more accurate, though — and to offer links to services to offset the output (and maybe also tips on how to reduce it while traveling).
Nice job! But how can I edit the method of travelling, when I upload my travel schedule with iCal?
I second Gavin. I’m stuck at my Japan trip starting end of the week. Being in Nara, I’ll go for Tokyo by train and then fly back to Hamburg via Frankfurt. I can’t tell Dopplr to calculate this. So unfortunately it’s not really working for me. I guess I stick with “by plane” and doesn’t care about the calculation anymore.
Btw. Dopplr should know I won’t go by train from Tokyo back to Hamburg. Neither by car. Thought about that? I like the simplified GUI of Dopplr more than anything else. Why put radio buttons if you don’t really need to?
Sorry for so much complaining…
[…] on from talking about the upcoming Dopplr addition of a carbon footprint meter using AMEE was release today. So I had a look. Easy to add and private by default. Easy! If […]
It seems that the calculator does work with multi-leg travels. Apparently, it assumes that if travels directly connect in the calender, they must be connected in reality, too (which isn’t the case with me, I just travel a lot :-))
However, why do I have some trips just “From … to …” and others including the back-leg “From… to… and back to…”?
Nice stuff. Those carbon offsetting schemes are dodgy, with some it’s not even quaranteed the trees planted will remain there long enough to offset the carbon. Anyway, having *estimates* of the carbon used is definitely not a bad thing, “making the invisible visible”, so well done.
But I have problems similar to what Gavin mentioned:
* No way to travel by boat (e.g. ferry or seacat Helsinki to Tallinn)
* Multiple legs get all messed up:
I flew from A to B, then got the train from B to C on the same day. Two days later I got the train back from C to B, then the next day plane back from B to A.
A->B, B->C, C->B, B->A
I entered these into Dopplr as two trips (one by plane to B, one by train to C).
But Dopplr says I went from A to C by train, then C to B by plane, then C to B (again!) by train, then B to A by plane.
A->C, C->B, C->B, B->A
(PS, nice use of the recaptca!)
Thanks for the feedback, everybody. We’re taking notes here at Dopplr HQ.
Hi Matt
That is great news and congratulations I cant wait to utilize it. I would also love the opportunity to chat with you please drop me a mail to arrange a call if thats ok?
David,
Nice to hear from you. We’ll be in touch.
Very very cool. The first service 2.0 that makes you feel guilty :)
I really appreciate it, especially the trick to share the profile with fellow travellers. Great conversation enabler this could be (feeling green already and talking like yoda as you can see).
Oh, please please add motorbike as a mean of travel :)
R
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I fourth/fifth other forms of travel. I also use the bus (though to be fair automobile could cover it, given that I could be the only passenger!) as well as seacat/ferry and probably too unglamorously for you, a bicycle. :D
Actually, given that I pretty much do anything possible to avoid using a plane, could you add the option to set a default radio button for your own profile? Only it gets rather annoying constantly unselecting plane, to the point that I might have to get on one to save the RSI. ;)
How about adding “bike” to mode of travel - I do that a lot. Also, everything that Gavin said.
[…] Dopplr Blog » Blog Archive » Calculate the carbon impact of your travels with Dopplr (tags: dopplr travel carbon sustainability) […]
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