Routemate

Inspiration

Daily commuters often travel in the same direction while paying for separate taxis, leading to higher costs, traffic congestion, and unnecessary fuel consumption. We created RouteMate to make ride sharing simple by connecting passengers with drivers who are already traveling toward the same destination.

What it does

RouteMate is a real-time ride-sharing platform that helps passengers discover and join nearby shared rides instead of booking separate taxis.

Drivers publish their route, destination, fare, available seats, and estimated arrival time. Passengers search for their destination and instantly see ride-sharing options nearby. Once a passenger requests a shared ride, the driver receives a real-time notification to accept or reject the booking.

The platform includes:

Real-time ride sharing and booking
Live driver and passenger matching
Driver verification system
Passenger, Driver, and Admin dashboards
Ride history and wallet
Women-only shared ride option
Live GPS route visualization
Real-time ride request notifications

Our vision is to make ride sharing smarter by allowing passengers to join an active trip if the driver's route passes near their pickup point. This enables multiple passengers traveling in the same direction to share one vehicle while automatically splitting the travel cost, reducing traffic congestion, fuel usage, and carbon emissions.

How we built it

We built RouteMate using Next.js, React, Node.js, Express.js, Socket.IO, Clerk Authentication, AWS DynamoDB, Leaflet with OpenStreetMap, Render, and Vercel.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was building reliable real-time ride-sharing between passengers and drivers while keeping seat availability, booking status, and notifications synchronized. We also resolved deployment, authentication, and AWS integration issues.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Built a working real-time ride-sharing platform.
Implemented live passenger-driver matching.
Developed dedicated Passenger, Driver, and Admin dashboards.
Added driver verification and Women-Only Ride mode.
Created a modern, responsive UI with live route visualization.

What we learned

We gained practical experience building scalable real-time ride-sharing systems using WebSockets, cloud databases, authentication, deployment pipelines, and modern full-stack development.