Why we built a carpool around events, not commutes

Most carpooling software is built for one trip: the same drive, to the same place, at the same hour, five mornings a week. That is a real problem and it has a clean shape — two fixed endpoints and a fixed clock. Solve it once and it mostly stays solved.

It is not the shape of a student's week.

Scroll back through any group chat in September and count the trips people are actually trying to organise. A show in Sacramento on a Friday. The airport at the start of break, with a term's worth of luggage. Somebody's car to Tahoe for a weekend. The game. None of those repeat. Each one is a one-off that a lot of people happen to need on the same evening, announced weeks apart, and organised around something on a calendar rather than a stop on a route.

So TAGO is built the other way round. The event is the thing at the centre, and the trip hangs off it.

The trip has a name before it has a route

Every event and place in our catalogue gets its own page — the Friday show, the airport, the lake, the home game. Each page carries the date, the venue, a link you can drop straight into a chat, and a live count of how many people are going.

That count is the real one, read off the actual list, and it is allowed to say zero. Zero is useful: it means you are first, and somebody being first is how a trip starts. What the page will not do is invent a crowd to look busy.

Here is one you can open right now, without an account: UC Davis Football vs. Montana on September 26. Names and routes stay private — that is what signing in unlocks — but the date and the count are public, because the question you have before you commit to anything is simply whether anyone else is going.

The way back is planned with the way there

Everyone knows the failure mode. Getting there is easy. At 11:40pm the plan evaporates.

For events and places, the return leg is part of the same plan rather than a second, separate search. A driver who is going and coming back says so when they post, and a rider asking for a seat can put both dates in one ask — out and back — instead of two unconnected requests that might match two different people.

The system watches for the gap, too. When the outbound leg has finished and the return has not been started, our server reminds the driver: quietly, never in the small hours, never by moving anybody's money or minting anything on their behalf. It cannot conjure a car. It can stop the ride home being the part nobody thought about.

It keeps looking after you close the app

The other thing about event trips is that they get planned early and filled late.

So the matching does not stop when the app does. Once you have posted a trip or set up a routine, our server keeps scanning for people going your way, up to two weeks ahead, and sends you a suggestion when it finds one. Those sweeps run on a schedule on our side, not in your pocket. Nobody should have to sit refreshing a board to get to a concert.

When nobody is going the whole way

Sometimes the honest answer is that no single car makes your entire trip. That is where the train and the bus are better at this than we are, and we would rather hand you over than pretend otherwise.

When a driver's route passes near a station that connects onward to where you are going, the match comes back as two legs: ride to the station, take transit the rest of the way. The station, the walk, the line and the timings arrive with the suggestion, so you see the whole journey before you accept any of it. The train's not the problem. Getting to it is.

No commission, and no service fees

None of this works if somebody is taking a slice off the top.

There is no commission on a trip and no service fee. The platform fee rate in our code is the number zero, and every settlement checks that what the rider chipped in equals what reaches the driver, exactly — if those two ever disagreed the trip would raise an error rather than quietly move a wrong number. Joining, posting and searching cost nothing at all.

What a rider contributes is a share of a trip that was already happening, capped at the federal mileage rate for the day of the trip. The whole arithmetic is written out here, including the one fee that is not ours and gets added at checkout.

Who is actually in the car

You sign in with your .edu email. That is the door, and the badge on a post claims exactly that much and nothing more: a university email. Next to it sits a rating from every trip that person has taken, in both directions, because riders rate drivers and drivers rate riders.

There is no promise here that a car will be there for your event. It depends entirely on who is going, which is why the useful move is to post early rather than three hours before doors. If you want to see the whole thing with a real weekend attached, we wrote out every honest way to get from Davis to Aftershock — shuttle, paid lots, transit, bike valet, and a seat in a car that was going anyway.

The commute will go on being a solved problem. The Friday night is the one worth building for. Sign in with your .edu and see who is already going your way.