Go Ride: A Safety-Aware Route-Corridor Matching Framework for Peer-to-Peer Car and Bike Ride Sharing with Real-Time Tracking

Abstract

The rising cost of fuel, traffic congestion, and empty seats in private vehicles require a rethinking of peer-to-peer mobility options beyond casual carpooling. This paper proposes Go Ride – a cross-platform ride sharing system, which enables car and bike owners to connect with passengers heading to compatible destinations. Go Ride uses route-corridors as the basis for matching transportation means with potential passengers. The owner’s route is represented as an ordered polyline covered with a configurable corridor. A ride is granted if the passenger pickup point and destination are within the corridor, follow the route direction, do not exceed the available seats, and the owner’s vehicle and personal details are verified. Each ride is scored using a weighted scoring system that ranks route similarity, temporal proximity, fare, driver reputation, and verification level. The scoring function is applied only to the set of rides that satisfy hard constraints, so safety requirements are prioritized over optimization. The architecture decouples client applications, application services, matching engine, and safety services from persistent and secure storage. The system introduces one-time-password (OTP) based onboarding, document verification, transactional seat booking, sandboxed payment processing with refund guarantees, real-time GPS tracking with emergency SOS management, privacy-preserving communication channels, and post-ride-only reviews. The paper evaluates the precision of matching, invalid-sequence rejections, search latency, SOS delivery, and task-based usability on a test dataset and a prototype implementation. The paper expects Go Ride to offer better recommendation and trust-building mechanisms at the community and campus levels compared to existing location-based carpooling platforms.