CoRide

Inspiration

Our team believes climate change is one of the most important issues of our time, but we kept asking ourselves why people don't act on it as consistently as they should. We identified two root causes: it's hard to conceptualize the real impact of everyday choices, and most climate solutions are either inconvenient or expensive. Bikes aren't practical for everyone, public transit isn't accessible everywhere, and electric vehicles are out of reach for most people.

We wanted to give people an easy, free way to help the environment and actually see their impact. The answer was already in plain sight: every morning, hundreds of employees drive to the same office at the same time, almost all of them alone. That's not just an environmental problem, it's a coordination problem. CoRide solves it, and as a bonus, saves its users a significant amount of money.

What it does

CoRide is a mobile app that connects coworkers for shared commutes. After signing up, users complete a quick onboarding with their home address, office, work schedule, and vehicle details. From there, the app surfaces compatible carpool matches based on route overlap and timing, and users can request rides, coordinate through in-app chat, and manage everything in one place.

What sets CoRide apart is how it makes the impact tangible. The app tracks exactly how much money each user is saving and how much CO₂ they're keeping out of the atmosphere. The numbers add up fast; an employee with a 20-mile commute who carpools daily saves around $620 a year and prevents 66 pounds of CO₂ every week, the equivalent of planting a tree every ten days. CoRide also projects these numbers forward, so a user might see something like: "If you keep this up for five years, you'll save $3,100 and prevent over 17,000 pounds of CO₂." At the company level, a 500-person office with 60% participation prevents over 1,000 tons of CO₂ annually, the same as taking 225 cars off the road entirely.

Rather than just showing raw emissions numbers, CoRide translates CO₂ avoided into comparisons people can actually feel, like trees planted and cars taken off the road. And because carpooling works best when it becomes a habit, the app includes a leaderboard, badges, and weekly goals that make sustainability social and competitive within a workplace. When coworkers are brought together through shared commutes, awareness around climate action spreads organically through a company rather than feeling like something imposed from the top down.

How we built it

We built CoRide using a React frontend, FastAPI backend, SQLite database, and the Google Maps API for route generation. Users input their commute, and we convert routes into GPS coordinate data. Our system then compares these routes to measure overlap and compute a similarity score, which is used to match users. Once matched, users can request rides, coordinate schedules, and track estimated cost savings and CO₂ reduction.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges was figuring out how to match real-world routes in a way that was both accurate and fast. We also had to deal with the “cold start” problem, without enough users, matching becomes less effective. On top of that, we had to think carefully about trust and usability to make sure people would actually feel comfortable using the app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud that we took a genuinely complex coordination problem and turned it into something simple and natural to use. Our matching algorithm weighs route overlap and schedule proximity in real time, and getting it to surface results that actually feel relevant took serious work. We also built a complete product, not just a feature demo. The full ride lifecycle, chat, impact tracking, and gamification all come together into something cohesive that we'd actually want to use ourselves.

What we learned

We learned that the real problem isn’t a lack of drivers, it’s a lack of coordination. Even small improvements in how people are matched can have a big impact at scale. We also realized how important user experience is, especially when building something that relies on trust and behavior change.

What's next for CoRide

In terms of next steps, we want to improve our matching algorithm with more precise route data and smarter optimization. We also plan to add features like incentives, gamification, and company-level dashboards to track impact. Long term, we see CoRide becoming a core part of how companies approach commuting and sustainability.

Built With

• fastapi
• google-maps
• react
• sqlite