Inspiration
Female travelers have very different issues and certainly very different risk-management patterns than male travelers might have. Gone are the days of reliance on men for commuting! Females will be driving for females, not as an obligation but to empower each other’s role as students, professionals, or just a woman. Our idea calls for uniting unorganized female carpooling communities on social media platforms and to set them formally for easy usage.
Recent sexual harassment allegations — and past incidents of sexual assault by drivers — have presented challenges for companies like Careem, Uber. Meanwhile, this can be launched with hopes of opening up the industry to more women where they can travel on their own, with females, alongside earning a few bucks.
Problems
- Harassment and rape cases.
- College/University dropouts: no reliable conveyance.
- Losing Job opportunities: Commuting to farfetched areas is costly.
- All over the place carpooling requests (on social media groups).
- If the unmoderated, possibility of spamming eg: Ads.
- No prompt notifications of females commuting in the same areas.
- Sharing ride track on public platforms/groups is unsafe for females.
- No proper two-way feedback and review system.
What it does
In this app, we aim to make ride-hailing safe for women. The app is broken down into two major female-centric functionalities:
- Corporate van service and tracking facility
- Safe car-pooling
Females can register themselves either as a rider or as a traveler. A user can post their timings and location they’ll leave from and the location they want to reach.
The features include accepting and posting ride requests(where relevant riders will get notified), tracking, SOS alert generation in case of emergency, 3-tier connections(like linked-in), building a community, 2-way feedback, and rating system, and AI-based FR & gender detection to authenticate the rider before creating a request on app. The cost will be calculated according to the distance covered and will be split between the number of people registered for the ride (including the driver). For making sure that only female users have signed up at the app, they'll have to enter their CNIC number and their gender will be further confirmed by an AI-powered facial recognition algorithm. Additionally, we plan to extend the app with a corporate van service for female commuters.
The form that we used for collecting user requirements/needs : click here
Selling Features
- Always travel with a female co-passenger.
- AI-powered security authentication when new user signs up, additionally taking the CNIC# as an additional field.
- Safest way to commute with like-minded people.
- In case of an emergency, send SOS alerts to your contacts.
- Notify your family and friends while traveling on the route to your Home/Office.
- Travel with 3 tier verified carpool buddies.
- Not reliant on more than 1 party: Doesn’t get un-operational in uncertain times.
Link to our pitch: click here
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Being able to design and brainstorm the user journey and make the refined prototype. Dockerize the app and build the whole backend structure. Pushing our limits to sit and pull this idea off and covering a number of different aspects.
Challenges we ran into
We were being able to scale up the concept from just a random problem to a big prototype. All of us had different roles, and each offered different insights and approaches to the initial idea that we couldn’t have thought of. Aligning everyone on the same page was a great achievement and then it was also a challenge to assign tasks out on. Not being in the same room meant we had to just absolutely nail the planning. That bit was the trickiest and was coupled by our constraint against the timeline.
What's next for Drive(H)ers
Our Business Model includes the following future Innovations:
- Social campaigns planned to train more females to learn to drive and become more independent.
- Maps marking places where there were reports of harassment in the city so that the pool provider and the rider know how safe it is to take those routes. Alternate route suggestions for such routes!
- Some benefits for car owners can be added, i.e:
- Sharing the vacant seat and earning some points.
- Redeem your points to Re-fuel your car.
- AI algorithm can be further optimized for transgenders, and Bias to be removed/improved.
- Van services with corporate packages can be launched
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.