Road Trip Calculator, Mel Mark, 2021

Background

I love to go on road trips with my dog and camp along the way. I'm also a type A planner that likes to have a rough estimate for costs.

Traditionally, I have used the United States Department of Energy's price calculator to estimate the price of fuel, but I believe it could be more accurate.

Their website uses the national average of regular grade fuel to calculate the total cost, but this is significantly flawed if you like to do a lot of driving in California, like me, where the price of fuel is much higher than the national average.

Therefore, I made a tool that accounts for state averages, segments of the road trip, up-to-date accuracy, and fuel grades (regular/mid/premium/diesel).

Installation

You'll want to run the following commands to install the required packages

• pip install pgeocode
• pip install simplejson
• pip install selenium

You will also need a Google Maps Platform API key. You can get one for free but be sure to keep it a secret so it can't be compromised.

Once the packages are installed and you have an API key, use the following to run in the terminal (make sure to use python3),

• python road_trip.py "key"
  • Replace key with whatever your Google API key is
    • (keep the quotation marks wrapped around it, though)

Notes

This is just a quick little tool I made one late night preparing for a trip out to NorCal (from the Midwest where I'm from). If you have suggestions on how to improve it, please give me a shout or feel free to fork it and improve upon it yourself!

Safe travels and always fill up for gas before the gas light comes on ;)