RideShare

Group Members

It’s hard for students to find people to share a cab with to the airport near the holidays. Usually students rely on spamming the dorm mailing list, or end up taking the cab alone when they could have shared the cab with someone and saved money. Spamming the dorm list is also inefficient because many people simply ignore these spam messages or filter them out of their inbox, and it’s hard to keep track of all the cab sharing requests.
Students often need to take a cab or rent a Zipcar to buy groceries at the supermarket or to travel to certain places. They often end up traveling alone because there is no centralized system to find other people with similar needs.
Many students want to find buddies to travel with them, but they normally only ask their close friends. It takes too much time and effort to advertise that they want to do a certain activity, such as hiking or picnicking, to many people, especially to people they don’t know. This makes it harder for students to find new friends who share their interests.

We plan to build a website, called RideShare, with three main uses:

Users can post that they want to share a ride to a certain destination with other users. They do so by creating a posting on the website, and if there is a match with another posting, the website will notify the user immediately. Otherwise, the user can opt to receive a notification of someone's interest in their posting via email so that the user does not have to constantly check the website for updates.
Users can search for postings in the website. If there is a match, the user will be given the option to contact the person who created the posting. Otherwise, the website will suggest that the user post a new request.
Users can create a profile and read other users’ profiles. This will help users decide if they want to share a ride with a certain person or if they have similar outing interests with other users so that they can set up ride sharing appointments in the future.