This App Will Find You The Most Tree-Filled Commute Route

Unfortunately for city dwellers, strolling through the concrete jungle doesn't have the same calming effect as, say, a walk in the park.

Enter Walkanomics, an app that's like a gift to commuters in many respects, as it has numerous features focused on making city-walking more pleasant and productive. The app's creators have just rolled out a new feature that aims to make your commute more scenic. Instead of optimizing a route to give you the shortest commute, users can now opt to have it direct them towards the most tree-lined route. A slider from "beautiful" to "fast" will let you select the perfect mix of how scenic and how speedy you need your path to be.

British developer Adam Davies said his role as a father made him reconsider the importance of walks featuring greenery. "When [my son] was a newborn baby, I was often taking him out in the pram, and he really liked tree-lined areas. Whenever he wasn't seeing trees, he was crying. So, I was thinking it would be useful to know where all the trees are in the local area," Davies told Fast Company.

The information—which covers central London, Paris, New York (all boroughs), San Francisco, Toronto, Buenos Aires, and Glasgow—is pulled from a mixture of open city sources and aerial photos of urban canopies.

Eventually, he'd like to add other categories to Walkanomics' algorithm as well, including the safest route, the cleanest route, and the hilliest. Check out the video below to see the app in action:

This article was originally published in 2015 and has been updated.