Anticipating the cost of the next road trip
Authors: Daniel Roelfs
Abstract: Car sharing is an excellent method to reduce the number of cars in a city by allowing users to borrow a car only when they need it. It also boosts the number of electric cars in a city by sharing the cost of buying an electric car among many users. Bilkolletivet is a Norwegian non-profit car sharing service that lets users borrow cars at a reasonable price. To anticipate the cost of a planned trip, this Shiny app lets you fill in the distance and duration of the trip, and compare prices across different types of cars. This way, you can anticipate the cost of your next road trip!
Full Description: Car sharing is an excellent method to reduce the number of cars in a city by allowing users to borrow a car only when they need it. It also boosts the number of electric cars in a city by sharing the cost of buying an electric car among many users. Bilkolletivet is a Norwegian non-profit car sharing service that lets users borrow cars at a reasonable price. To anticipate the cost of a planned trip, this Shiny app lets you fill in the distance and duration of the trip, and compare prices across different types of cars. This way, you can anticipate the cost of your next road trip!
This app scrapes the tables from the Bilkollektivet website. The server.R script downloads the information, and wrangles the data, taking into consideration discounts etc., and the cost per person if you're sharing the car with multiple people on the trip. The tables are displayed using the awesome functionality in the {gt} package.
English and Norwegian text and units are used interchangeably in a fashion I thought would make it easiest to use. It's not always easy to find suitable English translations for names of car types, and even if good translations exist, it might be awkward. Currency is in Norwegian Krone (NOK).
The main purpose of this app is to easily and quickly calculate the cost of a trip. With an easy click, you can compare the cost of different car types, and the additional cost of renting a car for a day longer, or the extra cost of taking that touristic detour you always wanted to do. Some cars have higher rental price per hour or day while having lower price per kilometer, while others have a lower price per time unit and a higher price per kilometer. This app lets users anticipate the budget they should set aside for a trip, and lets users balance the costs and the benefits of renting a specific car type for a planned trip..
Keywords: web scraping, rvest, gt, personal finance, car sharing
Shiny app: https://danielroelfs.shinyapps.io/bilkollektivet/
Repo: GitHub - danielroelfs/bilkollektivet_app: Shiny app to calculate cost of Bilkollektivet trip
RStudio Cloud: Posit Cloud
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