GreenRide

GreenRide is an app that brings together riders and drivers to create ecological, sustainable, and efficient trips.

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Inspiration

According to Mobility Labs, 85% of vehicles transport a single occupant today. In fact, they write “Every day we ignore a surplus of transportation capacity: the empty seats in the vast majority of cars on the road.” There isn’t currently a modern day solution to efficiently and effectively carpool. Despite the onset of RideSharing apps, such as Lyft and Uber, the wave of online shopping, and the internet, Average Vehicle Occupancy (AVO) has only gone down since 1977. Furthermore, modern day Ridesharing, while bringing down the number of cars on the roads, doesn’t reduce the number of trips people are making. In this project, we aim to address this: reduce the number of trips people need to make by carpooling.

What it does

GreenRide aims to create more effective and efficient carpooling. Every day, those of us with our own vehicles travel to work, to the gym, to the mall, etc. If someone was going in the same direction, with minimal disruption to the route, they could ride with the original driver without hassle. Since a single trip solved both individuals’ needs, the number of trips that would’ve otherwise been made went down.

How we built it

GreenRide’s frontend is built on Reactjs. The initial backend is built on Nodejs. By leveraging these javascript libraries, we were able to create a fullstack project that was able to receive input on the frontend, store that information in the backend, and perform an algorithm to find the best rides for riders.

Challenges we ran into

Neither of us had very much experience on the frontend, so creating a react project and learning how to integrate everything into a nice UI was difficult. Furthermore, our MongoDB database stopped working overnight, so our final product didn’t have objects that were stored in the database, but rather just coded into the backend. Moving forward, this can be fixed relatively easily.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our willingness to communicate and work together to combine our strengths to make a great application. One of our first accomplishments that we’re proud of was the creation of our mockup design. While it was challenging to come up with a design we all agreed on, constant discussions and collaboration helped achieve a design we are proud of.

What we learned

Our team learned the importance of collaboration and working together to build GreenRide. Working on this project in a few days with various technologies took a lot of hard work and commitment together, and wouldn’t haven’t been possible without our passion for creating sustainable solutions. We also learned how back-end and front-end development can be used together to create a user-friendly tool.

What's next for GreenRide

What we’d like to complete is fully adding in database functionality so that data is actually stored and can be retrieved even after users log out. We would also like to complete all the pages on the frontend, such as the profile and settings page. If this project has enough interest, we’d love to host this project and get some users that could pilot this app and see if it works.

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