Carpool Coordinator

We made a website where people can see colleagues who live near each other and have compatible work schedules. This application encourages the use of carpooling reducing carbon emissions.

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Inspiration

Car emissions are a significant contributor to bad air quality and climate change. In urban environments, 50 to 90 percent of bad air quality can be attributed to cars (https://auto.howstuffworks.com/percentage-of-air-pollution-due-to-cars.htm). We sought to solve this problem by enabling safe carpooling.

What it does

CarpoolCoordinator is exactly what it sounds like. To signup, simply enter your login details, work address, home address, and your work schedule. It then shows you a list of people who live nearby and work at the same location, it also gives contact details. Carpooling with strangers is a safety issue so the only people who are shown are people who work at your work (verified by email domain).

How we built it

We built it using a React front-end, Flask back-end, CockroachDB database for user data, Google Cloud for hosting CockroachDB, and IBMCloud foundry for hosting the application.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into challenges with setting up some of the cloud infrastructure. We also had a lot of issues with linking the front and back ends.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of the idea we created. Being able to see colleagues that live near you and carpool with them could enable many people to save money and the environment.

What we learned

We all learned about CockroachDB as well as how to navigate some of the cloud infrastructure. We also improved upon our pre-existing JS and Python skills. We also learned about how react handles forms.

What's next for Carpool Coordinator

Ideally we would improve the signin functionality and facilitate conversations within an app. We'd also like to enable larger companies to host their own version of the site for their employees.

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