Students Develop Ride Share Website Carpanion

For most students, group projects are a source of dread, when unfairly divided workloads and conflicting schedules among group members contribute to a less-than-enjoyable college experience.

This was not the case for nine students in Professor Christopher Andrews’s fall section of Software Development, an advanced course in the computer science department that is targeted towards upperclassmen. Those students, Rob Bracken ’15.5, Joey Button ’17, Andrew Hwang ’15.5, David Cromwell ’16, Max White ’16, Hanna Nowicki ’16, Marisa Dreher ’16, Mohamed Houtti ’16 and Jack Desmarais ’16, not only enjoyed a successful working relationship throughout the semester, but kept working together throughout J-Term in order to finish what they started. Their final product, website Carpanion.org, seeks to fill what Bracken described as an opening the group saw on campus.

“What we set out to do was to solve the need for a ride that so many Middlebury students experience every weekend,” Bracken said.

The group estimated that there are around 15-20 trips undertaken by Middlebury students to popular destinations like Burlington, Boston or New York City on any given weekend, with a huge surge coming at the beginning and end of semester breaks. With the common knowledge that many of those rides often have empty seats, however, Bracken and his classmates decided to create a network that could better coordinate the supply of rides with the demand.

“Right now, if you want to go somewhere off campus, you have two choices: beg a friend, or pay a ton,” Bracken said. “There’s no marketplace for getting off campus.”

Carpanion allows drivers planning an off-campus trip to post their ride online, where potential fellow trip-goers can then view what is available on a given weekend. Riders can then bid on the ride, with the driver ultimately having the final say in accepting bids and who he or she takes for the weekend. All participants will need to have a middlebury.edu email address in order to register.

While the app is currently driver-centric, the next step Bracken and the group intend to take is to allow a rider to post a desired ride in order to attract any drivers thinking of making a trip but who may be hesitant over variables such as the cost of gas. Bracken and the group see the app as both a functional way to solve an existing problem, and as providing other benefits.
“There are a few places people do this already, but everyone in the group felt that the other services were inadequate and incomplete,” Button said. “The cumulative goal was to create a site for members of the Middlebury community to find cheap solutions for rides off-campus, and maybe meet someone awesome in the process.”

“We’re trying to make it easier to see what’s out there, rather than just having to post in a Facebook group and hope someone responds,” Bracken added. Bracken stressed that the rides will also provide a social aspect, as there’s “no better way to get to know someone than on a long car ride.”

Although Carpanion originally started as a class project last fall, the group found themselves unprepared to launch the app at the class’s conclusion in December. They also found themselves unwilling to simply write the app off as a project of a now-past class and forget about it. Thus, they took advantage of a lax J-Term schedule to buckle down and finish the website. The group met three times each week, and started each meeting with the members detailing what they each had accomplished since they had last met.

This system of group accountability was ultimately quite successful with the group putting the last touches on the site and launching it in the final week of the term. Now, as the group advertises the app they have created, they are waiting to see how the student body will react.

“If people see this as we do, as a real need within the student body, then it could easily take off,” Bracken said.

Should the app find success, Bracken and the group face a difficult path forward, with Bracken and another group member graduating with the class of 2015.5 and leaving campus. Right now, the plan for the group is to see how the app fares now that it is open for Middlebury students to use and judge.

Regardless of whether Middlebury students take up the app, Bracken emphasized that the whole experience has been an entirely worthwhile one.

“What is great about it is that we built it all the way through. All the front-end and back-end stuff, the coding, all of us contributed,” Bracken said. “It’s very satisfying to see the finished product.”