Getting home for the weekend might be easier with Ribit, a community ride-sharing platform created by two UF engineering students.
Mason Downes and Liliana Lusvardi have been developing this app for the past six months. Ribit will focus on ride sharing within Florida.
The app matches student drivers and passengers per route, according to Downes, a 24-year-old computer and electrical engineering graduate student. Both drivers and riders will have their own profiles, and passengers can book rides on a driver’s planned route.
“The goal of what we're trying to do is honestly to solve a problem that we see a lot. We see it in Facebook groups, Snapchats, Reddits,” he said. “People are having issues getting places away from Gainesville.”
While the app will be available to everyone in Apple’s app store for free, users will need a .edu email address to gain access.
Ribit is currently pending approval from the app store and is scheduled to launch at the end of September.
The app is equipped with other safety features, such as live tracking and secure payment, Downes said. Drivers will also set their own prices, but prices will be capped at the IRS reimbursement rate of 70 cents per mile for business vehicles, he said.
“Ribit is going to be much more affordable than traditional ride-share because essentially, we're connecting drivers that are going the same place with passengers who want to go to that place as well,” he said.
Downes tackled the majority of the coding while Lusvardi, a 20-year-old computer engineering junior, conducted primary market research.
The idea was born in the UF ECE Entrepreneurship Club, an organization in the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering designed to support aspiring founders, inventors and leaders, according to the department of electrical and computer engineering’s website.
Through the club, Downes and Lusvardi connected with investors to pitch and launch their idea.
“We feel like we have a good backing of people, both advisors, investors and everything in between that are helping us succeed,” Downes said.
However, competing bus companies, such as RedCoach and FlixBus, and ride-booking apps like Lyft and Uber, have been operating in Gainesville for years.
“Marketing is the key to success,” Sofie McIntosh, a 19-year-old marketing sophomore, said.
McIntosh has been serving as Ribit’s social media marketing intern for the past two months. She said there is a need on campus for more affordable and accessible transportation, citing UF Facebook groups with thousands of members trying to find rides around the state.
“There is a gap in the market for something specifically like this, where it's not designed for people to profit,” McIntosh said.
Because the app is designed for convenience, passengers won’t pay traditional ride-booking fares, she said.
But the biggest marketing challenge has been getting people to understand the premise of the app, and that drivers are traveling to their own destinations to begin with, according to McIntosh.
Steesha Dsa, a 21-year-old computer engineering senior, is one of the students Ribit is designed to help.
Dsa is from Miramar, Florida, and doesn’t have a car.
She said on long weekends or holidays, it’s difficult to find a ride home and plan around her class schedule. Dsa said bus tickets to South Florida are expensive, inconvenient and frequently sell out.
On one occasion, Dsa’s parents had to drive to pick her up from UF because she couldn’t find an alternate way home.
When she can take the RedCoach bus, round-trip tickets are over $100, traffic is heavy and the bus stops for roughly 30-40 minutes, she said. This extends the five-hour journey to approximately seven hours.
“It's a struggle,” she said.
With a platform like Ribit, Dsa said she would feel safer and more confident.
“I'm giving my money to someone that's not going to scam me,” Dsa said.
However, Dsa said that RIbit should consider a ranking system for both drivers and passengers that could improve safety.
Brady Boyd, a 20-year-old applied physiology and kinesiology junior, also shared some concerns about Ribit. As a student from Silver Spring, Maryland, she often relies on friends and the bus system to run errands or commute to her job at Southwest Recreation Center.
Boyd said she feels safe with most drivers from Uber and Lyft because they have been established for a while.
“I guess since it's a new app, I probably wouldn't feel comfortable going with, like, males as drivers at first, at least for a while, so I would say that would be, like, my only thing or concern with that,” she said.
Downes said he is in the final stage of testing and receiving feedback from a test group. He said he is optimistic about the launch.
“Hopefully we can provide a safe, affordable, and convenient experience for everybody to use,” Downes said.