Group Rides
Many events, especially in rural areas, may require participants to drive each other. The Travel plugin helps people to organize group rides to and from events. Recurring rides enable people to establish a carpool between their home and work, for instance.
Watch the following video to understand how it works:
Use Cases
The Travel plugin takes care of all the usual questions like:
- who can give me a ride?
- did you leave yet?
- how far are you? when should I come out?
- should I meet you on the corner?
- should I bring the wine?
The whole thing is a bit like a peer-to-peer Uber or Lyft, except it’s not a taxi service, and doesn’t require taxi licenses, because drivers don’t charge passengers. Instead, it matches Passengers to Drivers who are going in the same direction and arriving/leaving at the same time.
Drivers can limit their rides to be only for Friends, Family, or other relationships (Labels). Drivers are able to choose how many miles, or how many minutes, they would be willing to go out of their way. Passengers can join rides just they can join events or any other streams. Passengers can also Subscribe to be notified if and when rides matching their criteria become available. When a Passenger joins a ride, the route and departure/arrival are updated to account for picking them up and making it in the for an event:
During the Ride
The passenger is able to confirm when they have entered a car, or the app figures that out when they start moving together. On the latest iOS and Android, the Driver can use Google or Apple maps for their iOS instructions, with the website sending notifications about passengers being ready, or messaging the driver.
However, we have created a prototype GPS system so that the driver can see all their stops and passengers coming up, and get the text from the trip conversation be read aloud.
Parking Watch
Currently, all GPS navigation software takes you door-to-door, to the destination you entered. Then you end up circling around the block, looking for marking. What you really want, instead, is to end up at a parking spot as close to the destination as possible, so everyone can get out and walk.
We are working on a marketplace that will also match people who plan to walk back to their car, with people who are still driving to the destination. It can match based on arrival time. One of the cool features about it is that the owner of the parked car gets chat messages by text (so as not to disturb their meeting) while the driver hears their replies messages using text-to-speech (so as not to take their hands off the wheel).
