EcoRoute: Smart School Transportation Optimizer

EcoRoute Student Carpools
EcoRoute Coordinator Inventory
EcoRoute Coordinator Vehicle Load Optimizer
EcoRoute Student Savings
EcoRoute Student Impact
EcoRoute Coordinator Trips
EcoRoute Student Commute
EcoRoute Student Events
EcoRoute Coordinator Recommendations
EcoRoute Student Dashboard
EcoRoute Coordinator Activities
EcoRoute Coordinator Dashboard
EcoRoute Landing Page

Inspiration

EcoRoute started from a simple, lived observation: students who live a few minutes apart drive to school separately every day, and coaches plan away-game travel based on whatever's convenient, not on what actually produces less carbon. Families who wanted to make a greener choice had no way to see the impact of the choice they were already making. We built EcoRoute to make that invisible footprint visible and actionable.

What it does

EcoRoute gives coaches a vehicle-configuration optimizer for event travel and gives families a privacy-safe carpool matcher for daily commutes, both reporting into one shared emissions number a school can track over a season.

How we built it

The product is live today, built on Next.js for the dashboards, Supabase for school-scoped data storage, and a custom rule-based emissions model using EPA CO₂ constants and real fleet fuel-economy figures, not a black-box AI guess. Gemini 2.5 Flash is used narrowly, to turn the optimizer's math into a plain-language explanation for coaches, not to make the underlying emissions decision itself.

Challenges we ran into

Designing one product for two very different users, a coach managing a season schedule and a parent coordinating tomorrow morning's drop-off, meant building two distinct dashboards that still had to share the same underlying emissions logic. Protecting student location privacy while still making carpool matching useful was a second real constraint, solved by matching on ZIP + neighborhood rather than exact address.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We didn't stop at a concept, EcoRoute is a deployed, working product with real login flows for both user types, not a static mockup. We also built in human-in-the-loop control from the start: the AI recommends, but a person always makes the final carpool or vehicle call.

What we learned

The biggest lesson was that a sustainability tool only works if people trust the number behind it. When a coach can see why three vans beat one bus for a specific roster, they act on it. We also learned, through researching this space, that we're entering a market with real incumbents (GoKid especially), which sharpened our thinking about what makes EcoRoute different rather than just another carpool app.

What's next for EcoRoute: Smart School Transportation Optimizer

Short-term: direct conversations with athletic directors and sustainability coordinators to pressure-test pricing and the optimizer against real season schedules before we scale onboarding.

Medium-term: opt-in precise carpool mapping via Google Maps API, a parent/driver portal, and a mobile app with pickup reminders.

Long-term: become the default sustainability-reporting layer for school transportation, expanding from individual schools to full districts.