Archived: Active Travel Hackathon 2018

**UPDATE** Unfortunately, we will be postponing this event until late May/early June due to a series of conflicting events. We have had a great number of diverse registrants so far and look forward to seeing you all with many more registrants in a number of weeks.

We will be updating the registration website with a new date very soon.

For those already signed up, you will receive the new date via email and you will not need to re-register.

We apologise for any inconvenience this causes.

Join us for the Transport for London (TfL), Met Office, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) London Hackathon at Amazon’s office in London.

This is a two-day event sponsored by Cloudreach, where you will have the opportunity to compete against other teams of developers to create the most innovative application running on AWS.

Learn from subject-matter experts from TfL, Met Office, and Cloudreach to help address some of London’s key challenges.

The Vision

The recently published Mayor’s Transport Strategy sets out a vision “to make London a city where people choose to walk and cycle more often by improving street environments, making it easier for everyone to get around on foot and by bike, and promoting the benefits of active travel.”

This vision aims to reduce traffic, pollution, and noise; and to create more attractive, accessible, and pedestrian-friendly streets for citizens. A more engaged, physically active society leads to a healthier people.

The plan includes a target that 80 percent of all Londoners’ trips will be made by foot, bike, or public transport by 2041. Achieving this goal will require a considerable shift in behaviour citywide.

This is where you come in! We want to open this challenge to the wider developer community to find innovative solutions to this key challenge. Through teamwork, TfL believes we can provide our audience with the best information, tools, and encouragement it needs, to help influence behavior toward more sustainable and active travel.

Ahead of the event, we encourage you to think about the challenges below and will provide you with the data concerning cycling, walking, air quality, weather, and roads.

The Challenges

Encourage a mindset shift:

Encourage active travel for the first and last miles. Drive good behaviour through social influence by making it easier to share travel plans and through wearables. Inspire the development of new travel planning technology and features. Encourage combining TfL and Met Office data to develop air quality/active travel products.

Enable and support more active travel:

Improve the functionality and personalisation of existing active travel journey-planning and navigational tools (e.g. routing features enhanced by new cycling and walking data), and build new resources and technology.

Empower users to share feedback:

Develop new tools and enhancements to allow crowd-sourcing of customer feedback and reporting of data errors (to support management and maintenance of cycling and walking datasets). Provision new mechanisms for communicating expectations for healthy streets and the barriers / improvements that can inform future policy development.

So whether you’re a start-up or a developer, if you are in a position to develop a product that addresses the challenges outlined below, you should join us at the launch event on 10 April.

Where and When

Venue: Amazon’s offices – 60 Holborn Viaduct, EC1A 2FD, London

When: April 10 – April 11, 2018

Free drinks and nibbles will be provided at event.
Through this transport-focused Hack event, TfL, AWS and Met Office are keen to work with the start-up community, app developers, UX and design specialists, and anyone with a passion for data in order to build new applications and unlock new insights from the data.

We’ll ‘hack’ on 10 April from 10:00 to 18:00, and resume on 11 April from 10:00 to 16:00.

You will receive AWS Promotional Credits, which will help you take your project from idea to implementation. Subject-matter experts from TfL, AWS solutions architects, and developers from Cloudreach and Met Office will be onsite to provide support and mentorship. At the end of the two-day hackathon, a panel of experts will choose the most innovative application, and prizes will be awarded.

What you’ll need

You will need to bring a laptop and you will need an AWS account. AWS credits and an API will be provided to access the data.

Places are limited so please register quickly at https://travelhackathon2018.splashthat.com/ to not miss out on this great event!

We look forward to seeing you there!