Find a Ride Florida

To provide older Floridians access to local medical and non-medical transportation options to help them remain active and independent within their communities.

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Inspiration

Just over 20% of Florida’s population – 4.5 million residents – are 65 or older. This statistic, which is expected to increase over the next ten years, means more people in this age group will be on the road. While older adults tend to have fewer crashes, they face higher fatality rates when involved in a crash. The Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) addresses aging road users' safety and mobility needs through Safe Mobility for Life, a program and partnership between FDOT and Florida State University’s Pepper Institute on Aging and Public Policy. We work alongside experts in the fields of transportation, engineering, healthcare, aging services, planning, licensing and law enforcement to develop educational materials and resources that meet the transportation needs of Florida's growing aging population. Our goal is to improve aging road user safety and mobility by achieving a reduction in fatalities and serious injuries, while maintaining their connection to the community. The work we do supports Florida’s Target Zero initiative to reduce the number of transportation-related serious injuries and deaths to ZERO. Working together, we implement the Safe Mobility for Life Strategic Action Plan with a proactive and data-driven approach to achieving our goals. Mobility Independence is one of six focus areas in the plan with an overall goal to “Educate Floridians on how to access and use transportation options to keep them safe, mobile, and independent in their communities.” To expand and reach this goal, Safe Mobility for Life partnered with the University of Florida’s (UF) Institute for Driving, Activity, Participation, and Technology (UF Find a Ride Team) to provide access to older adults, individuals with disabilities, and family caregivers to an online listing of available transportation service providers in all of Florida’s sixty-seven counties. One of our developers recalled "When I was getting my degree in computer science, I always wanted to work on projects that helped people."

What it does

FindaRideFlorida.org exists to help Florida’s aging road users find the freedom of mobility beyond the driver’s seat by providing access to available transportation service providers that can transport them to their desired destination.

How we built it

As a collaborative team between the UF Institute for Driving, Activity, Participation, and Technology and the UF GeoPlan Center was created to take the previous iteration of the site called the Florida Senior Safety Resource Center to the next level with GIS Mapping technologies, to become Find a Ride Florida. Previously powered by Drupal, the entire application was reimagined and rebuilt using Angular, Typescript, and the Google Maps APIs.

Challenges we ran into

We had never used Google Places before.  But the online documentation was very helpful and made it easy to understand and implement what we needed.  We appreciated the flexibility it offered - like being able to restrict the result set to the State of Florida. Collecting quality data from the service providers also proved to be a significant challenge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Over 7 years, thousands of searches have been performed providing Floridians with trusted information to the transportation options most relevant to meeting their needs. Using a data-driven approach, we have used Find a Ride Florida to identify transportation gaps throughout the state to inform policy makers and regional planners.

What we learned

We've learned that it takes continuous effort in reaching such high goals for mobility independence and reducing the number of transportation-related serious injuries and deaths to ZERO. Connecting those with a need to transportation options that can serve them best is just one small way Find a Ride Florida is contributing.

What's next for Find a Ride Florida

To continue refinement of the tool, particularly in assisting non-transit service providers in defining their areas of service into a GIS data set. We have translated the site into Spanish and working to implement a custom LLM with Google Translate for transportation specific terminology.

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