Ryde Carpool: Analyzing Student Travel Trends

About the Project

Ryde Carpool is the social carpooling marketplace that connects college students and enables them to buy and sell seats in each others’ cars. This project investigates where students travel and how they discover and interact with the carpooling marketplace.

In the United States, there are 19.4 million college students and 51% of them don’t have a car on campus. 78.5% are attending college in-state and live within driving distance of their hometowns. In a survey of 382 California students, 60.6% indicated they travel outside of their college city at least once a month and 73.3% say they feel safe traveling with other students. Respondents live an average of 250 miles from home and 55.5% indicated they would travel more if carpools were more readily available.

Ryde Carpool is a web-based carpooling marketplace that enables the buying and selling of empty car seats for students. This allows drivers to recoup their cost of travel while providing ryders the opportunity to travel hundreds of miles within a college budget. Since launching Ryde Carpool on March 15th, there have been 231 user signups and 115 rydes posted on the site. Transportation accounts for 52.2% of Cal Poly’s greenhouse gas emissions and 94% comes from commuter travel. Those numbers exclude students’ emissions while traveling on weekends and returning home during break. Ryde Carpool seeks to minimize individuals’ and organizations’ impact on the environment and helps them meet their sustainability goals.