Neighborhood Bikes

Inspiration

We were thinking about Uber's services when we realized that bikes can be extremely expensive and hard to rent. This website connects owners of bikes with prospective renters of bikes to decrease their cost. This increases the availability of bikes, which is good for the environment and for people's health.

What it does

Instead of buying our own bikes as a company, we pay bike owners to lend their bikes to our customers. Because we don't have to buy our own bikes and would only have to replace bikes that got damaged, we can lower our prices below those of our competitors. We also have a discover section, which would ideally use the Google Maps API to find bikable journeys for a person to go on in order to encourage people to bike more.

Not fully shown on the website, but part of our plan

In order to incentivize leasers to bring bikes to underserved areas, they would be paid less when they lease a bike in an area with a surplus of leasers.

How we built it

We used Javascript, HTML, and CSS, as well as Bootstrap, to design the website. Under the Discover tab, we used the Google Maps API.

Challenges we ran into

We were unable to make the Google Maps API do bike routes because we could not get Node to work on Glitch. Anytime we added our package.json file, the website crashed. Also, while you can see in the code that we tried to make a form element interact with the Google Maps functionality, we were not able to complete it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We managed to figure out enough of the Google API to embed a map and manually change destinations and starting points with the code. We used Bootstrap to make an aesthetically pleasing website. Finally, we created a business plan that would solve a problem and would work in the real world.

What we learned

We learned more about APIs and Bootstrap, and we learned a lot about the effects of transportation on the environment while researching our hackathonproject.