DartRide

Inspiration

Safe Ride is an important service provided to Dartmouth College students by Dartmouth's Safety and Security team. Basically, paid student drivers are tasked with providing other students who feel unsafe traveling around campus, primarily at night, a ride to another facility on campus. However, due to physical limitations, this program becomes incredibly strained on 'On Nights' and during cold winter nights.

This limitation is further perpetuated by the manual handling of all Safe Ride requests. We learned from meeting with the Safety and Security office that the current system of handling Safe Ride requests revolves around the manual handling of all requests by the current Safety and Security office staffing the call desk. The current system reveals several points of inefficiency:

The Safety and Security officer must field all inbound calls for Safe Ride requests, which can only be currently requested via phone. They must then log this request by hand and decide which rider to delegate this request to, using nothing but their own intuition. The limitations of the officer in charge of handling Safe Rides means that high demand for Safe Rides will cause:
- Jammed phone lines which could lead to very risky situations in case a caller is in immediate danger
- Possible inefficient delegation to drivers
- Long processing time
The driver has no idea about the other active Safe Ride requests. It very well could be that there's a student requesting to picked up right next to driver's current pickup location, route, or dropoff location. The only way that an efficient pickup can be made is if the Safety and Security officer and delegate it.
- Since Safe Rides can have up to 3 riders per car, non-filled cars represent longer wait times for riders and less efficient trips.
Students have no easy way to cancel their rides or receive updates. Everything is currently handled via call.
- Drivers will sometimes show up to a location for pickup while the student has either already left or is not aware that the driver is here.
- For students, they also have no clear indication of when they're next in queue or is about to be picked up.

What it does

Our project integrates the user interfaces for both Ride Share drivers and riders. This solution cuts out the logging and delegation limitations posed by having a middle man in the processing of a request. Additionally, our interface moves the requesting of Safe Rides off of voice call and onto the internet and through text message updates.

For riders, this interface will provide an easier way to request Safe Rides, provide an easy method to cancel their request, and consistent updates so that they can be ready for Safe Ride when it gets to them.

For drivers, this interface will provide an easier way to receive and keep track of their work orders. Additionally, our routing algorithm guarantees that the delegation of Safe Rides provides for the most riders serviced in the least amount of time.

How we built it

We built the front end using bootstrap and jquery calls. We then integrated this through AWS Lambda. The backend routing is handled in python using the OSRM API. Text messaging is done through Twilio's API.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into several challenges in building the front end and eventually integrating it with AWS Lambda. This was due to our inexperience with some of the tech that we were working with. However, the project was an incredible experience and we've learned a ton.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Throughout this process, all members of the team have stepped out of their comfort zones to learn new stacks and tech. We've worked hard to learn and work together to integrate all of our work into a final project is currently working.

What we learned

We learned AWS Lambda, Bootstrap, among other things. Additionally, while we were all friends previous to this project, this experience has improved our teamwork and bonds.

What's next for DartRide

After this project we're planning to communicate our work to Safety and Security and hopefully get a refined version released to the students of Dartmouth. Eventually, we hope that this project can reach different institution's safe ride equivalents.