A new way to meet | A way to share a ride or a service | For easy going and helpful people | Documentation
Ushas is an app that mixes car sharing and car shooling using Facebook, to reinvent the outdated way of going to school.
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Ushas is simple. It is based on the assumption that some students use their cars to go to school and that, on their way, they are likely to pass close to their classmates’ home. We want to develop a pairing system. In addition, it can be observed that this car sometimes stays in the garage all day, while it could benefit someone else. Thus, instead of driving alone, the owner could then make new encounters and enjoy a more pleasant time while dampening its path and saving grams of Co2. Similarly, the owner can make his car profitable, even when he is not using it.
The compensation could be done in several ways. The first option is a classic contribution to costs through a calculation of the cost / km depending on the number of people, and the reference of the car (gas / diesel / year / etc). Either the people who share their trip are in the same school and so the "sharer", who does not have a car, offers to help the driver on a topic he would have previously determined. Either people who share their journey are not in the same school, and then, either the skills of one can help the other, or a service can be exchanged (gardening, grocery shopping, meal preparation, driving the vehicle for someone who does not have the license, etc.).
The proposed service requires: a geolocation system, an online payment system, a calendar system and a chat system. The social network that offers these features, and on which most students are registered, is Facebook. We can then imagine a native integration to the Facebook website by adding a "School Ride" tab and a dedicated app that would group all these services to help bring these students to school, such as a scholar bus 2.0.
Includes a location service to better plan and run your journeys within your neighbourhood.
All the payment facilities are provided inside the app experience. (powered by FB messenger).
Thanks to FB messenger you will also be able to discuss and plan you journeys and meetings in the app.
Learn more about the technical aspects here.
Nowadays, students have more and more activities; they also want to eat better (no pasta nor ready-made meals). But this requires a minimum of means. Hence, many students have a job along their studies. According to the INSEE "if they did not work, the salaried students would have a higher probability of 43 points of succeeding their year". Thus, a major item of expenditure, which it would be interesting to reduce in order to avoid the necessity of accumulating a job, is transportation. For long distances or holidays, solutions already exist, but what about daily journeys? If we look at a map of higher education schools, many are on the outskirts of big cities to accommodate a growing number of students following higher education ( 10 times more than 50 years ago according to the French government). There is then a real need to revolutionize these journeys.
At Ushas, we want to help students who want to save money, whether they have a car or not, while using a more pleasant, less expensive and more user-friendly way to make their short trips - mainly from home to school. It is therefore important to target students with a car (they will be called the "owners"), those with a driver's license (they will be called the "drivers") and the others (they will be called the "sharers"). Our goal is to connect users who use their cars on a daily basis and others wishing to change modes of transport (no longer use public transport), but also those who own a car and do not want to leave it unused, although they might not want to leave it to a random person either.
