Campus-Ride

Inspiration Campus transportation is often expensive, unreliable, or unsafe for students traveling at odd hours. We built Campus Ride to create a trusted, student-only way to share rides within a single campus community.

What it does Campus Ride lets verified students offer or request rides, discover nearby trips on a live map, and coordinate through in-app chat. To improve trust and safety, we added identity/payment verification flows and clearer driver/rider visibility on the map.

How we built it The app is built with React Native + TypeScript on Android-first native architecture. We use Firebase Authentication for sign-in, Firestore for real-time data, Storage for media, and Cloud Functions for secure backend logic. For location and routing, we use Mapbox with OSRM/OpenRouteService. For trust and monetization flows, we integrated Stripe (payments + Identity) with webhook-driven state updates.

Challenges we faced One major challenge was balancing strict location validation with real user behavior: students want quick manual input, but mapping systems prefer exact geocoding. We redesigned pickup/destination handling to be more flexible while still supporting structured locations. Another challenge was keeping real-time map/chat UI polished and performant while syncing multiple async systems (client app, Firestore, Cloud Functions, Stripe webhooks).

What we learned We learned how important trust UX is in mobility products, how to design resilient real-time flows across mobile and cloud services, and how small UI changes (avatars, marker labels, clearer status states) can significantly improve usability.