About Travel by Trees

Travel by Trees plans bike routes through Antwerp that prefer parks, trees, and waterways, not just the fastest road. The idea is simple: make the greener way the easy, obvious choice.

How the green route works

Every street in the covered area carries a greenness score, worked out from the Groenkaart vegetation map plus OpenStreetMap parks, forest, and water. A routing engine called BRouter uses those scores to favour leafy, calm streets while still getting you where you’re going.

Alongside the green route, the app draws a plain shortest route (grey and dashed) so you can see the trade-off honestly: how much greener the route is, and the few extra minutes it usually costs. The Greenness slider lets you lean more towards fastest or greenest.

What it covers

This is an early version focused on Antwerp. Routing and the map are limited to roughly a 12 km area around the city centre. Pick a start and destination inside that area to get a route.

A note on the numbers

The green and shortest routes come from two different routing profiles, so their times aren’t perfectly comparable; treat the comparison as a guide, not a stopwatch. The greenness figure reflects mapped parks, vegetation, and water near each street, which is a good proxy for a pleasant ride rather than a guarantee.

Who made it

Travel by Trees is an independent project by Vincent Peters, built on open data and open-source tools. See the attributions for everything it stands on, and the privacy policy for the little data it uses. Spotted something off, or have an idea? Use Give feedback in the menu. It’s read.