At some point I was searching for an open source car pooling service. I realized there weren’t any so I started developing one on my free weekends.
While I haven’t made much progress so far, I have been observing how much as a society we have been relying on route planning software. Also, I cannot overlook the effect of such services on the planet (see Amazon, Uber, and many more).
With all this as a context, I have been asking myself the following questions:
- What would be the impact on society (especially inequality) if there were open source alternatives to such services?
- What would a common core look like? (i.e. what is the WordPress equivalent for transportation/route planning, is OpenStreetMaps enough?)
- What domain specific knowledge would it require to build such a software? (while in university I researched about the travelling salesman problem, anything else?)
- What safety protocols would we need to develop when there is no corporation insuring users? (i.e. if I order something from Amazon and it’s dead on arrival, I get either a refund or a replacement shipped to me for free)
- What’s the proper terminology to describe what I am describing?
Feel free to add any questions of your own. I created this post because I am free this afternoon and I wondered what it would like to discuss this with strangers instead of pondering on my own.
Edit: My free afternoon was taken away by an incident I had to respond to, it’s now late o’clock here, but I will do my best to reply to all you magnificent people.
I have probably seen too much NotJustBikes lately to say anything positive or constructive about car sharing and how it affects society. But when it comes to the technical side of implementing such a service, there are some interesting problems to solve (depending on the scope of your project ofc…). You mentioned the traveling salesman problem, which considers one agent who is trying to find the distance-optimal route. When it comes to multiple cars and multiple ride requests and time constraints, the kind of algorithms you want to look for are more generally called assignment problems. If you want to dive into code, you can look up “google hashcode 2018 rideshare” which was a coding competition with a closely related problem.
It’s nice to meet a fellow fan of NotJustBikes, them and AdamSomething have been pivotal for me. Sometimes I’m wondering if I am doing an Airbnb (aka trying to patch a broken system, making everything worse in the process). However, I truly believe transportation (both people and goods) is important, and the software supporting it should be open.
Wow, I took part on that challenge, I forgot all about it. Thanks for the suggestion, that’s what I am doing this weekend.
Obligatory link to submission for anyone to laugh at me.