Carpool Buddy

Inspiration

Many UCSD students take advantage of rideshares for various reasons as it is a cheap way to go back home for a weekend or carpool together to an event. The current system of a facebook rideshare group has proved to be inefficient for many people as it is difficult to search through all of the posts to try and find the kind of ride you are looking for. CarpoolBuddy is designed to solve this issue by providing an easy, intuitive web page that makes it easy to efficiently search through the page to find the type of ride you are looking for. The web page also requires the use of a UCSD emails to verify that the rides will be by your peers, which adds a layer of security.

Another goal of CarpoolBuddy is to help women feel safer with rideshares. Many women face the risk of sexual assault or sexual harassment when getting into a car with a stranger. CarpoolBuddy has the feature of letting the user optionally filter out the drivers by gender to allow women to feel more at ease using the platform.

What it does

CarpoolBuddy is an easy to use interface to find rides to events, and search for carpool buddies to join your ride! Features Include:

Sign-in Page - requires UCSD email
Request a Ride - if you are a passenger looking for a ride, fill out a form and get matched with drivers who are going a similar direction as you
Post a Ride - if you are a driver looking for carpool buddies, post a ride and allow users to request to join your car!
View your trips - view you ride history, including both rides you drove for and rides you were a passenger in
Driver Preferences - for added security, add preferences for gender of driver.

How I built it

First we did research on how to create simple web applications using HTML, CSS, and Javascript
Then we started using BootStrap to create more detailed front-end designs
Researched how to use Django, Firebase, and GoogleCloud to create databases
Connected front-end with back-end using Flask, as well as simple Javascript and Python code

Challenges I ran into

For a couple of us, this was our first hack-a-thon, and all of our first times making a web application. None of us had any web development experience prior to this, so we had to learn everything from scratch in the short amount of time we had. In the beginning it took some time to get familiar with HTML, CSS, and Javascript. We had to spend a lot of time learning the basics before we could start creating a working product. However we learned a lot along the way and are quite comfortable working with front-end web development now!

We also ran into trouble connecting the front-end and back-end, since we used bootstrap, which added a lot more libraries and frameworks to keep track of when hosting our website using flask.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We are really proud of what we accomplished, and feel that we learned a lot about creating beautiful web apps! We are especially proud of our user interface, which we created with the help of Bootstrap. In addition, we are very passionate about our app idea, as it is an application that will increase the overall safety of many students on campus and save a lot of money, as well as the environment!

What I learned

Creating HTML websites, styling with CSS, and using client-side javascript
Using BootStrap to create front-end design
Creating databases using Flask
Learned how to handle client requests with a response
Learned how to host a site using Google Cloud
Learned how to adapt to various environments and languages

What's next for Carpool Buddy

Use Natural Language Processing to interpret user input and match riders and passengers efficiently
Create Android and IOS applications for Carpool Buddy
Integrate more features to optimize the app