Road Errand

Share your trip. Help others. Avoid traffic.

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Inspiration

Watching delivery apps charge high fees for simple errands, we asked: what if someone already heading that way could help instead? Road Errand was born from the idea of turning everyday commutes into a community value.

What it does

Road Errand lets travelers post their route so neighbors can piggyback small errands — buy food, pick up packages, deliver items — on trips already being made. Requests are accepted, tracked, and rated in real-time, with a built-in trust system and social mini-games to keep the community engaged.

How we built it

React Native + Expo for cross-platform mobile, Firebase Firestore for real-time data and trip/request lifecycle, Firebase RTDB for live multiplayer games and notifications, and AsyncStorage for offline-first session persistence. Expo Router handled file-based navigation across 20+ screens.

Challenges we ran into

Keeping the request lifecycle consistent between two users in real-time without race conditions. Avoiding Firestore composite index limits by using client-side filtering. Designing a trust model that's simple enough for a hackathon but meaningful enough to matter.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A fully working end-to-end errand flow from trip creation to task acceptance, dual-confirmation completion, and mutual rating — all live on Firebase with zero backend servers. Plus a real-time multiplayer RPS game wired to RTDB as a social hook.

What we learned

Denormalizing data upfront saves enormous complexity at read time. Local-first (AsyncStorage) auth makes the app feel instant. Real-time listeners require careful cleanup to avoid memory leaks and ghost subscriptions.

What's next for Road Errand

Monetization via optional tipping, route-matching algorithm to surface the best-fit traveler, in-app chat per errand, expand beyond errands to carpooling, and a reputation score that unlocks higher-value tasks.

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