The Commute Diary is a time tracker designed to track and then compare time spent on commuting using various modes e.g. bicycle, car or public transport.

This utility helps you track your biking, driving or public transport use, so you can keep that time and show the comparison between them. The goal is to provide a way to find the most convenient commuting option. The creators of the Commute Diary understand that convenience is a subjective thing. While you may be alright with staying in a traffic jam, sitting in your car listening to music, someone else may want to get to the office as fast as possible to save their time for their friends and family. Or, another may simply want to enjoy a calm drive by avoiding a stressful commute.

Another example is cycling. This can be difficult in countries which are developing cycling infrastructures where there are a lot of conjunctions with car routes and pavements. This type of commuting can be annoying when you have to get off and on the bike multiple times during the route.

The idea of the app is to help find the best commuting option for you. Rather than trying to predict the time yourself or get an approximate time from someone else, this app helps guide you to record your own route time. When route times are collected and commented to the app, you will see your commuting mode averages. You can easily compare your average times and see the deviations from them.

Some examples are:

The morning route takes more time than in the evening. You have to wait longer for a tram in the evening. How hard are you pushing and as a result sweating when using a bicycle. It would be beneficial to use a commute type that will not cause you to sweat when going to work.

Eventually, you will know the time required to get from home to the office without rushing.

How it started

I just moved to Kraków. I bought a bike and started riding to the office. The city was new to me. So, I didn’t know routes or even any potential routes.

The Route :

I used Google Maps for my first three rides. I was not satisfied with the time and the route itself, because I was riding either on pavement with lots of people, or, busy roadways with busses and trucks. It was a stressful experience! I started to look for the nearest smaller roads with less traffic and fewer conjunctions, etc. I was pursuing a goal to minimize my time as much as possible. At first, I found one quite road, but it required getting on and off the bike many times. Then, I found which routes the locals use. They were going through a small yard, which was a significant shortcut.

Notes

I ran the experiment by logging my times to the Notes App. It worked well! Except for one thing; from time to time I would forget to stop the timer when I arrived at the office or home. So the time was spoiled. And, I’d have to do the same measurement over again. Forgetting to stop the timer was a frequent issue, and with the Notes App all that I could do was use some other indicators to find a stop time.

App

The Notes App was OK, but it quickly became annoying to maintain. That was the birth of Commute Diary, the app to organize tracked time of commuting.

Start/stop

The simplest path is just to start recording time and stop it at your destination, add a comment, and that’s it. This gives the app more continuity, and helps solve the issue with forgetting to stop tracking. The App has an auto save feature for when you arrive at your destination.

Auto-save at destination

The application automatically detects when you reach your home or office location and saves the time, so you have your track saved. To save the battery, once the destination is reached and the track is saved the app stops using its location services.

To enable this feature, first turn on the auto save and then specify your home and office locations. When the destinations are set, just click the start button. The application will stop and save your track when you appear within a certain radius of the entered destinations. Now you can be sure the app will stop tracking when you arrive at your destination!

Surprise

I was very surprised when I learnt that regular biking took 25 minutes, the car about 22 minutes and public transport was about 45 minutes.

In my case, I’ve proven to myself that biking was the most convenient commuting.