What If Google Maps Cared About Your Lungs?
What if the route that saves you 10 minutes costs you your health? We built CoolCommute to rethink how we navigate, where the goal isn't just to reach faster, but to breathe easier.
What If Google Maps Cared About Your Lungs?
What if the route that saves you 10 minutes costs you something you can't see on the map? Inside CoolCommute, an experiment in making urban navigation more climate-aware.
Imagine stepping out into Delhi on a summer afternoon.
The temperature is touching 40°C. Traffic crawls past you, a haze hangs over the road, and the sun makes even a short walk feel exhausting. You open your navigation app, enter your destination, and wait for the familiar blue line to appear.
The app gives you what it has always promised: the fastest way to get there.
But here's a question it probably doesn't answer: What will that journey expose you to along the way?
Maybe one route saves you ten minutes but involves a longer walk beside a congested road. Another takes slightly longer but uses public transport more effectively and reduces the time you spend walking near traffic. A third might involve a long wait at an exposed bus stop during peak afternoon heat.
On a conventional map, these routes are primarily journeys measured in minutes and distance.
For the person actually making the journey, however, there's a lot more at stake.
And that led us to a simple question: What if navigation could help us think beyond the fastest route?
That's the question behind CoolCommute — a project exploring how public transit routing, air-quality information, and temperature conditions could come together to help people make more informed commuting decisions.
1. The Problem With a Perfectly Efficient Route
For years, navigation technology has become exceptionally good at solving a particular problem: getting us from point A to point B efficiently.
It helps us avoid traffic, discover public transport connections, estimate arrival times, and find alternatives when a road gets congested. These capabilities have transformed the way we move through cities.
But cities are changing, too.
Extreme heat is becoming a more serious concern for urban commuters, while air pollution remains a major challenge in many Indian cities. A journey that looks perfectly reasonable on a map can involve prolonged outdoor exposure, a walk alongside heavy traffic, or waiting for a connection in uncomfortable conditions.
Think about your daily commute for a moment.
- Have you ever chosen a longer route because the shorter one involved too much walking?
- Have you waited for a bus under the afternoon sun?
- Have you wondered whether taking the metro for part of your journey would be a better option?
- Have you ever wished your navigation app considered the conditions you would experience, not just the time you would spend travelling?
These are not just routing questions. They are questions about how people experience their cities.
Of course, no navigation app can remove pollution from the air or make a heatwave disappear. Nor can a route recommendation guarantee that a journey will be healthier. But technology can help make relevant information more visible when people are deciding how to travel.
What if environmental conditions became another factor in choosing a route, alongside time, distance, and convenience?
That became the starting point for CoolCommute.
2. Meet CoolCommute: Navigation With Another Dimension
CoolCommute is our attempt to explore a different way of thinking about everyday mobility.
Instead of treating travel time as the only meaningful measure of a journey, we're building a platform that brings together public transit routing, interactive maps, and environmental information.
The idea is straightforward: generate feasible journeys, evaluate them using multiple factors, and help commuters understand the trade-offs between their available options.
A route could be convenient but involve substantial walking. Another might rely more heavily on public transport. A third could offer a different balance between total travel time and estimated outdoor exposure.
Rather than pretending there is one universally perfect route, we want to make those trade-offs easier to understand.
This is particularly relevant in cities where a typical commute may involve several modes of transport: walking to a bus stop, catching a bus, transferring to the metro, and walking the final stretch.
Each segment contributes something different to the overall experience.
A journey is not simply a line on a map. It is a sequence of decisions, connections, waiting periods, and environmental conditions.
CoolCommute is being designed around that reality.
3. From an Idea to a Working Web Application
A promising idea is one thing. Turning it into a usable application is another.
We wanted to move beyond a conceptual dashboard and build an interface where someone could explore a journey, view routes on a map, and begin understanding how environmental factors might influence a commuting decision.
The web application provides the visual layer of the experience. Users can interact with a map and explore route information, while the backend handles the work needed to retrieve and process the relevant data.
For mapping, we're using Mapbox. For public transit routing, we're using OpenTripPlanner (OTP), an open-source routing engine that can combine transit schedules with street-network data to generate multimodal journeys.
This distinction matters.
A map helps us see where we're going, but a routing engine helps determine how we can get there. CoolCommute builds on that routing foundation and explores how journeys can be evaluated using additional information.
We've also been developing a scoring layer that considers factors such as travel time, walking exposure, and environmental conditions. The goal is to compare routes using more than duration alone.
Imagine two journeys with similar arrival times. If one involves considerably more walking beside congested roads, that information may be worth considering. Similarly, an option that relies more on public transport could change the amount of time spent outdoors.
The important part is not that one route will always be better. It's that commuters should have more useful information with which to make the decision.
Environmental conditions vary across locations and throughout the day, and any exposure estimate depends on the quality and resolution of the underlying data. We're treating these estimates as decision-support information, not medical advice or a guarantee of safety.
That distinction is central to building a tool people can trust.
4. The Hard Part: Making Routes Mean More Than Minutes
Generating a route is only the beginning.
The more interesting engineering challenge is figuring out how to compare journeys that look similar on a map but offer very different experiences on the ground.
Consider a simplified example:
Route A takes 35 minutes and includes a substantial walk beside busy roads.
Route B takes 42 minutes but uses public transport for more of the journey and involves less walking.
A conventional time-first recommendation may favour Route A. But if a commuter is particularly concerned about outdoor exposure, Route B may deserve a closer look.
That doesn't automatically make Route B the right choice. The commuter may have a deadline, mobility requirements, budget constraints, or other preferences. And less walking does not necessarily mean lower total exposure in every situation.
The point is that a single number cannot capture every dimension of a journey.
For CoolCommute, this means working through several connected questions:
- Travel time: How long is the complete journey likely to take?
- Walking exposure: How much of the journey involves walking, and what environmental conditions might be encountered along those segments?
- Public transport: Which bus and metro combinations provide feasible alternatives?
- Environmental conditions: What air-quality and temperature information is available for the journey?
- Trade-offs: How should these factors be combined without hiding the assumptions behind a recommendation?
These questions become especially challenging when conditions vary along a route. A single city-wide air-quality reading cannot describe every street equally well. Likewise, a temperature measurement from one location may not capture the conditions experienced elsewhere.
The scoring layer therefore needs to be explicit about what it measures, what it estimates, and where its data has limitations.
We see this as an ongoing engineering problem rather than something that can be solved with one formula.
The ambition is to make route recommendations more informative while keeping the reasoning behind them understandable.
5. Bringing the Experience to iPhone
A commute doesn't happen inside a desktop browser. It happens on the way to college, at a bus stop, while walking to a metro station, or in the middle of a busy street.
That makes the mobile experience an important part of the project.
We've also been building an iOS version of CoolCommute using React Native and Expo, bringing the experience closer to the device commuters carry with them every day.
Building for mobile introduces a different set of considerations. Information needs to be easy to understand on a smaller screen. Important route details should be accessible without overwhelming the user. And the experience needs to feel practical when someone is making a decision on the move.
A desktop interface can give us room to explore a map and display multiple details at once. On a phone, the same information needs to be prioritised more carefully.
We're approaching the mobile application as another way to deliver the same core idea: help people understand their commuting options and the factors that may influence them.
The iOS build is also an opportunity to keep refining how the information is presented, how users move through the interface, and how the product fits into an actual daily routine.
Because even the most sophisticated backend is not useful if the person travelling cannot understand what it is telling them.
6. Under the Hood: Connecting Routing, Environmental Data, and AWS
Behind the map is a collection of systems that need to work together.
CoolCommute brings together a routing engine, geographic data, environmental information, frontend applications, and cloud infrastructure. Each component solves a different part of the problem, but the experience only works when those parts communicate reliably.
Here's a look at the technologies we're using.
OpenTripPlanner: Generates multimodal public transit journeys using transit feeds and street-network data.
GTFS and OpenStreetMap: Provide transit schedule information and geographic network data that support routing.
Mapbox: Powers the interactive mapping and route-visualisation experience.
Environmental data sources: Supply air-quality and temperature information that can support environmental estimates and route comparisons.
React Native and Expo: Support development of the mobile application alongside the web experience.
On the cloud side, AWS provides several of the building blocks that connect the application to its data and services.
- AWS Amplify supports hosting and deployment of the web frontend.
- Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda provide the API layer and serverless backend operations.
- Amazon Cognito handles user authentication.
- Amazon DynamoDB stores user profiles and trip-history data.
- Amazon S3 stores data snapshots used by parts of the system.
- Amazon EventBridge Scheduler triggers periodic data-refresh workflows.
One of the key lessons from this work is that the difficult part is not simply choosing technologies. It is deciding where each responsibility belongs and ensuring that the overall system remains understandable and maintainable.
The routing engine should focus on generating feasible journeys. The environmental layer should contribute relevant estimates. The scoring layer should compare routes according to clearly defined criteria. The API layer should expose the required data, while the frontend should present the results in a way people can act on.
Keeping those responsibilities separate makes it easier to improve individual parts without having to rethink the entire application every time something changes.
It also makes limitations easier to identify. If a route is missing, an environmental estimate is unavailable, or a data refresh fails, those are different problems and should be treated as such.
For a product that aims to inform real-world travel decisions, reliability and transparency matter just as much as the map itself.
7. Why This Is More Than a Mapping Project
It's tempting to look at CoolCommute as a navigation application with an extra environmental layer. But the bigger question is about what we expect technology to optimise for.
Software often turns complicated human decisions into a single metric because metrics are easy to compare. We optimise for speed, cost, distance, or engagement. These measures are useful, but they don't always represent the full experience.
Urban mobility is a good example.
The shortest journey is not necessarily the most convenient. The cheapest option may take considerably longer. The fastest route may involve more walking than someone wants to do in extreme heat. And a route with less walking may still have other trade-offs.
There is no single metric that captures every person's needs.
For one commuter, saving ten minutes may be the priority. For another, reducing time outdoors may matter more. Someone else may prefer fewer transfers or a route that is easier to navigate.
A useful tool should help people understand these choices rather than assume everyone values them in the same way.
That's why we're exploring a more flexible way to compare journeys. The goal isn't to replace conventional navigation or claim that every environmental trade-off can be calculated perfectly. It's to investigate whether more context can lead to better-informed decisions.
And perhaps that way of thinking could extend beyond commuting.
The same principle applies whenever technology helps people make choices in the physical world: the best recommendation depends not only on what is efficient, but also on what matters to the person making the decision.
8. What We're Still Working On
CoolCommute is an ongoing project, and there are important challenges still worth exploring.
Better environmental resolution. Conditions can change from one road to the next. Improving the spatial and temporal detail of the data could make route comparisons more representative of the journeys people actually take.
More meaningful exposure estimates. Walking distance alone is not a complete measure of exposure. Duration, changing conditions, waiting periods, and the limitations of available data all matter.
Transparent route scoring. Users should be able to understand why one journey is recommended over another. A score is useful only when its assumptions and trade-offs are clear.
Practical multimodal journeys. A route must be feasible, not merely attractive on paper. Transit connections, walking segments, and transfer times all affect the experience.
A better mobile experience. Route information must remain clear and useful on the small screen people rely on while travelling.
These are not just implementation details. They shape whether a product like CoolCommute can become something commuters genuinely find useful.
We would rather present a transparent estimate with clear limitations than suggest that a route is perfectly safe simply because a score says so.
9. A Different Question for the Future of Navigation
CoolCommute started with a simple observation: when we plan a journey, we usually ask how long it will take.
But in cities facing extreme heat and poor air quality, perhaps we should be asking a few more questions.
How much of the journey will I spend walking? What conditions might I encounter? Could another combination of public transport and walking better suit my needs? And what trade-offs am I making by choosing the fastest option?
These questions don't have universal answers. Nor can a single application solve the broader problems of air pollution, climate change, or urban infrastructure.
Those challenges require public policy, cleaner transport, better urban planning, and sustained collective action.
Technology has a more modest role to play: making information easier to access, helping people compare alternatives, and giving them more control over their decisions.
That is the opportunity we're exploring with CoolCommute.
We're building it to see whether navigation can become more aware of the conditions surrounding a journey — not just the roads and transit lines connecting two places.
Because the journey matters, too.
The air we breathe. The heat we endure. The time we spend outdoors. The choices we make before leaving home.
What if the future of navigation wasn't just about getting us there faster, but helping us understand how we get there?
That's the question we're building CoolCommute around, one journey at a time.
CoolCommute is an ongoing project exploring climate-aware urban mobility. Environmental estimates are informational and should not be interpreted as guarantees of safety or medical advice.
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