Good practice:

Ridesharing for families, teams and communities

Many parents have only a limited amount of free time for giving rides for their children to their hobbies and practices and for raising funds for teams. Coordinating carpools between families or teams can be a hassle.

Hyppää Kyytiin (Hop in!) is a mobile application for ridesharing developed by Welonbo, meant especially for those with a close-knit group around the same hobby or destination. With the app, the user can order a ride to, e.g., football practice or game. The ride request is forwarded to people who have enrolled as drivers in the app. For example, the parents of children of the same team or practice location can provide rides to each other’s children in the app.

The service is subject to a charge, but the money raised from it is mainly directed to the common good, such as the development of sports teams. Teams get a new fundraising method that doesn’t require any additional work. At the same time, using the app contributes to the environmental friendliness of rides to practices or games. Currently, the company takes 15% of the payments, which is needed to oversee and develop the application.

The basic idea behind the application is directing ride requests to suitable people. The app picks the drivers based on things like the route requested and the location of the people.

The company has three entrepreneurs who handle basics operations. Currently, the company has one actual employee. Another company from Lahti has coded the latest version of the application with a three-person team.

The test users have praised the idea of the application. There is no exact number of test users available, but there has been from 75 to 125 test users. After the technical challenges of the application have been tackled, and it has proven to be stable, the app can be launched for a broader audience.

The technical difficulties of the application have been the biggest challenge so far. Also, encouraging different groups to become users of the app has required more effort than imagined.

This kind of ridesharing app can work in many environments. It could be especially useful during the quiet hours of the day and in areas where there is no public transport, or it is not cost-effective to organize. However, preliminary tests have shown that the app is better suited for groups or people with the same destination than people just living in the same area.

Getting a ride at a specific time is a common problem with carpools. Demand and supply don’t often meet in ridesharing. This problem disappears when certain people go to the same place at a certain time. Also, when a lot of people travel to the same destination, e.g., to an event, using a ridesharing app would make it easier to find a ride.

The app uses fundraising for different purposes as a motivator. With the app, the drivers get compensation, which is not always the case with traditional carpools. Traditional ridesharing often excludes some people. The app allows more people to benefit from ridesharing.