Looking for a site to facilitate carpooling

July 19, 2008 8:46 AM

I'm trying to facilitate carpooling among a couple of dozen people for a series of events and I'm looking for a specific kind of site to help me do it.

There's 5-6 times coming up when about 20 people who are in location A need to go to location B. I want to help people set up carpooling each time in a way that's easy for them.

It doesn't have to specifically be a carpool site, the concept could be the same to reserve meeting rooms or make other kinds of appointments, for instance. The way I'd prefer it works is that for [event] , I need to say there's n cars with x spaces in each, go to this site and put your name in. When x people have filled up car n, you can't sign up for that car anymore and you fill up car y. You don't have to fill up one car to sign up for a space in another. (All cars accessible until filled). Users should be able to see not only that a space is taken, but who has taken it (so they can carpool with people they know, for instance.)

Anybody know of a site that does this? Failing that, anybody know of a perl script that does this?

Failing that, anybody want to write a perl script like this on spec? The organization involved here (I don't work for them) would consider it valuable and would (probably) pay pretty well for a working, successful implementation. This is a guess.

posted by luser to computers & internet (4 comments total)

You could do this with a wiki. The drivers could list their cars. luser's car (4 passengers max). Please sign up below. You would have to trust people not to sign up for a car that was full, and not to erase other people's names, of course. But if you're working with adults, then you shouldn't have these problems.
posted by Dec One at 9:00 AM on July 19

How about a simple spreadsheet on Google Documents?

|    Column A  	|    Column B	|


Joe's car (4)	________________
		________________
		________________
		________________


Tina's car (2)	________________
		________________

posted by misterbrandt at 9:51 AM on July 19

I'm pretty sure Evite does this. Of course, evite sucks in myriad other ways, so it might not be your best choice, but it has car pooling functions built in.
posted by jacquilynne at 9:52 AM on July 19

misterbrandt for the win, particularly since joe and tina are in fact the names of people likely to drive.
posted by luser at 11:46 AM on July 19 [1 favorite]