Backseat Driver

Inspiration

Hello judges! With gas prices on the rise, we wanted to find a way to help reduce the number of single occupancy cars arriving on university campuses each day. Introducing Backseat Drivers: a website designed specifically for Canadian university students to coordinate carpool rides to and from school. We believe this site would help mitigate student costs, minimize carbon emissions, and decrease the strain on university parking resources. As pandemic restrictions continue to lift, it could also serve as a way to connect students with their peers and establish more opportunities for community building.

What it does

Backseat drivers gives students the option to either create or find a ride to their particular university. To create a ride, the user can fill in information such as their name, phone, email, a brief message to other potential riders, the date of the ride, how many seats are available, the departure location, and school. After a ride is created, the ride will be added to a list of available rides which is viewable from both the navigation bar and dashboard using the find a ride button. We used Google Maps API to visualize the route. The view more option offers additional details for contacting the carpool organizer. Finally, we hoped to create a registration for the site, but were short on time. However, we managed to set up a profile page where user information would be added. Ideally, this information like location and school would only need to be filled in once and could be edited at any time.

How we built it

This website was built using React and Next.js for the front end, and Nest.js for the back end. To make the databases needed to store the information on our site, we used postgresSQL and Prisma. Note: We used two separate repos because we thought it would provide a clearer distribution of work between front end and back end.

Challenges we ran into

Since none of us were that familiar with the technologies we used going into this project, much of our time was spent looking at documentation. We also may have been too ambitious about what we could achieve in the 36 hour window we were given, and had to scale back some of our ideas to submit something workable.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud to have started and finished a project which we can hopefully improve upon in the future.

What we learned

Throughout this hackathon, we became much more familiar with React and Next.js, but also learned a great deal about the strategies we hope to employ for future projects. For instance, we now know the importance of taking the time in the initial planning stages to ensure that the clearest picture of how the end product will look and function is established.

What's next for Backseat Drivers!

Given more time, we could have a proper authentication system, a more appealing UI, and more features to cater towards university students (e.g. sections to add preferences for travel and more connection features such as saving carpool groups)