Show HN: Vado – A platform to encourage people to cycle and walk more | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Vado – A platform to encourage people to cycle and walk more

vado.cc

41 pointselbarbabrb43 comments

Hey there, we’re a collective of italian bike-enthusiast people who are trying to sensibilize other people to avoid car usage. Check out this new platform we just launched: https://vado.cc

It’s a sort of game where you can win a prize just doing miles commuting, riding by walking, cycling or with whatever vehicle which is not fossil fuel powered (we have a lot of checks in place so cheating by using a car or a motorbike) is impossible

While we're in beta races are free to partecipate! after they're gonna be really cheap

>we have a lot of checks in place so cheating by using a car or a motorbike

I used strava to track my rides a few years ago. After riding home I got in my car and did a errand. Forgot to turn the app off and it logged my driving like I was riding, though to be fair driving in my city isn’t much faster than biking….)

I've had the opposite happen in Google Maps (the activity history). It marked biked segments as occurring in a car.

Not quite sure how it happened. I probably outpaced motor vehicle traffic (I do so more often than not, in an urban environment). But that circumstance itself should have suggested the need for additional logic

After the activity is saved, you can edit and crop the activity to trim off the driving portion.

yeah Strava doesn't have a check in place for this, in fact there are a lot of unreal stats in there, we check the effective average speed of your commuting, and the 1st race has a avg speed limit of < 18km/h so unless you want to go around in your car at that avg speed without causing accidents or be yelled every 30 seconds is pretty much not-usable with a car.

Actually I can assure you Strava does have a check for this because I've been hit by it before when accidentally forgetting to stop the activity before loading up my bike and driving home. It flags the activity and forces you to edit your route to remove the offending section.

yes probably they've added something during the years, but on some segments at least here in Italy, there are some crazy times and speed, light years away from PRO numbers, so there's still some cheating going on

There's also some GPS glitches. I once got the KoM on a short section in a city where my speed was claimed 70km/h, when I probably was riding at 20.

I'm usually commuting at around 23 to 25 km/h average, so you're telling me I'm not going by bike? ;-)

nope, we're just saying that to compete for the 1st race the avg. speed needs to be under 18 km/h, maybe the 2nd race will be just commutings > 25km/h ;)

Launching this in winter is sub-optimal, eh... The UK is under the snow at the moment.

Edit: also check your "gloabals" on the home.

haha this is very true, we decided to launch now to collect feedback and be ready for when the weather will be nicer

I would love to sync my Garmin to it :) They're pretty easy going but all app integrations are hand-approved.

hi, yeah straight syncing with real devices like Wahoo or Garmin is something we could consider in the future, it really depends how much the platform will be used and how many requests like this we'll have

What about eBikes? Not technically powered by fossil fuels but charged by?

It really depends where the power comes from, not every charge station power comes from fossil sources. Btw driving an eBike is probably better than driving a car, at least for your health, and probably for the environment too

At the very least, the E-Bike is far more efficient at moving a single human than using an entire car.

Moving one person using a ~1500-2500kg vehicle with an internal combustion engine with ~25% efficiency, ignoring all the fuel source logistical inefficiencies.

Compare the E-Bike, at let's say 20kg of bike and 80kg of human, so 100kg, having the energy come from even dirty power plants it will still have been far more efficient and use less energy to move the human the same distance on the e-bike.

Also consider that many (and in some countries all) e-bikes are ped-elec, or electric assist, not entirely electrically motivated, and it's looking pretty good for the e-bike!

Always Be Coffeeneuring https://chasingmailboxes.com/category/coffeeneuring/always-b...

"VADO PRINCIPLES THE INTERNET IS A JUNKYARD This website emits 7 times less CO2 than global websites average. WE HATE COOKIES, ANALYTICS, YOU NAME IT We don't use cookies, we don't track anything you do on this site except for your location to know how far/fast you're going."

It's interesting that after that diatribe and encouraging you to get off your butt to walk/cycle that the prize is a 50€/$ gift credit on NETFLIX.

I get your point, we could have offered a 50€ on for example a pair of cycling gloves, but probably shipping them to your door will emit the same amount of CO2 of a week of you streaming on Netflix. Btw Netflix was the 1st thing that came in mind, suggestions on something digital which is more sustainable or simply better are welcome.

grocery gift card?

true, but which one? we can't know before who will win, thanks for the idea btw

Hey, nice idea, I downloaded the app yesterday and run into some problems. 1) When leaving the office I have around 3.5 km to walk to my home, so I wanted to log it. The app (Android 10 device) didn't start tracking - I'll give this to my inexperience and the fact I didn't pay attention. This morning, when leaving home for work, I made sure it started tracking, but when I got to the office, I pull my phone out of the pocket, check the app and see its logged only about 0.3 km? Wait a few moments to give it a chance to update - nothing changes. I say OK, let's at least log this - click stop, and now I don't see any page where I can see my current (total) distance.

Anyhow, not really interested in Netflix subscription - just liked the idea and decided to participate. Good luck with your project.

Hey jelicicm, thanks for your feedback,it's very useful. We've just released this beta version so probably some bug is still present. Did you received any message when you stopped tracking? Cause I can't see any activity logged this morning so something has gone wrong for sure. thanks!

I like this. There were a couple of years I joined the “mass commutes bike week challenge”. It involved joining a team ( my team was my university) and logging distance ridden on every day. It had your distance and a leader board. Not super complex but it worked. It did encourage me to ride more.

http://www.masscommute.com/news/2016/6/28/2016-masscommute-b...

Oddly a lot of the record of these isn’t on the internet anymore.

They seem to have switched to a new platform which I haven’t tried.

https://www.lovetoride.net/usa?locale=en-US

I like the simplicity of VADO and will try it out.

My workplace had this last spring. Turns out if you let (Dutch) cycling enthusiasts work out during the workday they will go for 200km rides. Weekly. That's 6 hours of cycling. I was amazed that people took that liberty but the big boss took it in good cheers. No further experimentation with working out on the job though.

hey acomjean, thanks for your message, yeah we tried to keep it super simple and somehow ignorant but not in a bad way :) it's still in the very early days so every feedback is super appreciated!

I like this :) 18km/h is a little low imo (looking at my strava stats I'm usually just over 20km/h on my commute rides) but it's a good idea to add a limit

Couple remarks on the website itself:

- enable SSR if possible, having to enable javascript for a static website is annoying

- I guess you created this website on a mac? Be careful with scrollbars when you do; MacOS hides scrollbar but other OS don't and you easily end up with multiple useless scrollbars (like here with 3 unneeded vertical scrollbars)

hey, thanks, good feedback, yes 18km/h is quite slow but we aimed to a broader range of people for this 1st race, even people walking can do it.

And yes I'm already aware about the scrollbar thing, i'll fix it shortly

Yeah it does make sense :)

Did you think about a race where you also _lose_ "distance points" when you travel faster than some speed? Like a malus for car use, great malus for plane, etc.

Would be best if it could refrain from removing points when using public transport (which could be somewhat doable giving a lot of public transport routes are public to some extent?)

cool, a malus when you try to "cheat" would be a nice addition for sure, also considering public transport, but that looks harder to implement

How about also promoting 'talking'? Get extra points for doing the activity with others? You can make more difference in this world by bringing people together while being active. Maybe by bringing people together based on the similar routes. We need to get more out of our bubble ;-)

I'm all for minamilism and get why it is the way it but this website does not encourage me to sign up. Most users will leave before they understand what to do and fewer still know what a PWA is.

Hi, thanks for your feedback, do you have suggestions on how to improve the sign up process? and for now the PWA is the faster/simpler/cost effective way to have this kind of platform up and running, and it's literally 2 taps on every phone to install it, so it's not that difficult, my 2 cents

Seems like someone took over their email account. Got some real wierd looking urls.

What url have you received? no strange activity detected on our end

This is great, after cycling and running then you can have a quick break to watch Netflix

How can I trust this website which has my location all the time?

Hi hmr, true but like every other website/app that want to measure where you're going, think Strava, Komoot or any fitness app

email confirmation seems a bit broken

also check spam folders, some mail servers flag our domain as spam

yes, the link was mangled by gmail's spam protection. after marking it as non-spam it worked

Basatissimi

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