As part of its long-term mission, CIS aims to be carbon-neutral. A large area of difficulty, as identified by the report generated by Metanoia and DITO (Drop in the Ocean), calculated that the CIS community emits an estimated 214 tons of CO2 from 6.4 million km of commuting. One of DITO’s possible solutions to reducing this number is to have fewer students travel to school by private cars. A possible system to enable the reduction of private cars used is a carpool system. Their key findings and main problems currently are:
The community has no way of knowing who is driving. The community has no way of knowing who lives where in HK. There is no system to share and “book” a ride. There is no way to encourage using electric cars other than through emails. There is no reward system to encourage students and parents to carpool to school.
To combat this problem, the IB CS department is looking to create a good solution to help students and their families connect to others and find ways to carpool together. The benefits are:
Fewer CO2 emissions and fewer fossil fuels are generated from non-electric vehicles. Less traffic on Braemar Hill, which means less idling of vehicles and shorter traffic/commute time to and from CIS. Encourage the use of electric cars through prioritization. Allow for alternative vehicles to be used, like bicycles (reduce emissions), helicopters (reduce traffic), and segways (reduce traffic and emissions). Allow opportunities to connect and build relationships with other members of the community.
Thus, I am proposing the addition of CIS Carpool. This app seeks to connect and encourage students to carpool together.
For our tech stack, we will be using Android Studio, Firebase Firestore, and Java. Through Firestore, we will be able to store data permanently, create users, allow community members to sign up with their school emails, and never worry about server downtime. Firestore is also free. Other options like MongoDB, Firebase Realtime, and AWS exist. MongoDB has suffered from intermittent outages in support for Android, even though their database storage system is great. AWS has a steep learning curve and doesn’t offer easy support for Android. It also doesn’t offer single sign-on with Google accounts, which our community uses extensively. Firebase Realtime suffers from poor reviews of its NoSQL database design.
Author: @ericrcwu001
Version: 1.0
Made using Java in Android Studio.