ROUTE ZERO FEATURE
T R AV E L L I N G GREEN WITH
ROUTE ZERO A revolutionary tool designed by university graduate Albie Baker-Smith, Route Zero is the carbon calculator charting a new path for sustainable travel
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ROUTE ZERO IN ACTION To travel from Bristol to London, you have four options: coach, train, electric car ride, or nonelectric car ride. The coach takes three hours and five minutes, and at 4.5kg of CO2 produced, gets an A rating, while the non-electric car options takes two hours and 24 minutes – but with 33kg of CO2, this option gets an F rating.
ow to get from A to B without SMEs and larger companies - which harming the planet? are increasingly aspiring to go green That’s the question University - will buy the tool so they can factor of Bristol graduate Albie Baker-Smith is in the environmental impact of doing determined to solve with his new travel business. carbon calculator, Route Zero. That up-scaling will be easier now The clever tool quickly shows journey Albie has won a UK Government ‘Young However, this F grade options between two places, including Innovators Award’, which came with a can be bumped up to a ‘C’ (13kg), by telling their costs, estimated times and, crucially, £5,000 grant and funding to work two the calculator that you environmental impact. days a week on the project. will be sharing the trip Journeys are given eco-ratings from A to The award came just at the right time with others, driving F based on the amount of CO2 they produce for Albie, who quit his job at Bristol economically, and not and users can then easily choose to carbon satellite software company Bright using the air-conditioning. offset the journey. Ascension at the end of 2020 to follow “It all started when I was going on holiday his passion: tackling the climate crisis. and wanted to find the greenest way to get But his journey to Route Zero started there,” 26-year-old Albie explains. long before then. As the son of two freelance illustrators “The travel calculators out there were clunky and not he always wanted to be an entrepreneur - “I was always very user friendly, so I decided to make my own. building and selling things to the neighbours,” he says “Travel emissions are such a visible part of the climate - and found he had a knack for pulling things apart and problem. 27 percent of UK emissions come from travel - a putting them back together. lot of which is single person car journeys – and I wanted to He started programming young, eventually joining find a way to incentivise people to change their habits.” the University of Bristol in 2015 and graduating from its The calculator is currently in its early stages and can be integrated Masters in Computer Science in 2019 with a used by anyone for free. As Albie scales up, he hopes that First. 84 | Outlook Travel issue 08
