Dropoff

Dropoff is a goodwill ride-sharing concept for people who are already heading in the same direction. It keeps the familiar structure of a ride app, but removes the money-first mindset. The product language is intentionally casual and friendly: people ask for a lift, drivers share a seat when it fits their route, and the app checks that the trip stays safe and sensible.

What Is Built Now

• A polished frontend landing/app shell that explains the product in friendly language.
• A lift-request section instead of a trip-request flow.
• Route matching logic that treats detours over 1 km as suspicious.
• A small in-memory backend with auth, lift requests, ride creation, and matching routes.
• A typed Express entrypoint so the backend can run locally.

Product Idea

Dropoff is for situations like this:

• A driver is already going from Bashundhara R/A to Brac University.
• Another person needs a lift from Jamuna Future Park toward Rampura.
• If the passenger’s destination fits the driver’s route, the lift can be confirmed.
• If the route starts drifting too far away, the app flags it as suspicious instead of treating it as a normal match.

The goal is to make helping each other feel easy, not transactional.

Safety Approach

The backend matching logic now uses a meter-based route deviation check.

• Pickup and drop-off are compared against the driver route.
• A route deviation greater than 1000 meters is marked suspicious.
• Suspicious matches are filtered out of the normal match list.

This keeps the system aligned with the same general safety expectations people would want from a standard ride app.

Frontend Structure

The current frontend is a single-page product shell with these sections:

• Hero intro with the Dropoff positioning.
• Lift request card.
• How-it-works explanation.
• Safety summary.
• Friendly usage reasons.

The UI is built with plain TypeScript and CSS, without relying on Tailwind at runtime.

Backend Structure

The backend is a lightweight Express API with in-memory data storage.

Routes

• POST /api/auth/register
• POST /api/auth/login
• POST /api/requests
• GET /api/requests/my-requests
• GET /api/requests/:requestId
• POST /api/rides
• GET /api/rides/active
• GET /api/rides/my-rides
• POST /api/rides/:rideId/accept
• GET /api/rides/:rideId
• POST /api/rides/find-matches
• GET /health

Local Setup

Frontend

cd frontend
npm install
npm run build

Backend

cd backend
npm install
npm run build

Notes

• The backend currently uses an in-memory database, so data resets when the process restarts.
• The frontend is a concept shell, ready for a real API connection or map flow later.
• Tailwind is still listed in the frontend dev dependencies, but the app itself uses plain CSS.