Overview

A dollar van is a fixed-route transportation system run by a network of independent drivers.

Although Dollar vans are a thriving transportation system that operates where subways and buses don’t - mostly in peripheral, low-income neighborhoods that lack robust public transit - they lack service maps, posted timetables, and official stations or stops. Riders come to know these networks through conversations with friends and neighbors, or from happening upon the vans in the street.

Today, Dollaride brings clean transportation to underserved communities by empowering drivers with financing, technology and infrastructure.

Su Sanni, the Founder of Dollaride, commissioned Blood & Treasure to build out the first version of a mobile ridesharing application and API that would make the driving routes and the drivers visible to potential riders based on their geolocation.

Su’s in-house development team had already completed most of an MVP for the mobile app, but he wanted to try the agency route in order to quickly iterate on customer feedback and to polish the app, as well as to build a web app geared towards the dollar van business owners who contract drivers.

Working with Chris Coles, Dollaride’s CTO, we started with a review of the existing codebases and then QA tests of the application to document any bugs in Jira. Where necessary we created missing wireframes for tasks that required them, then planned future sprints in advance so each stage of the development would be clear up to the delivery deadline. We also integrated HockeyApp to reliably deploy new test builds to all team phones and set up the AWS environment for the Dollaride API.

In the first demo Su and Chris wanted to transact as a driver and passenger while sitting right next to each other, specifically by:

• opening the app (both apps)
• navigating though the menu screens (both apps)
• inputing destination (passenger app)
• initiating payment flow (passenger app)
• inputing unique driver code (passenger app)
• toggling on/off driver move (driver app)
• seeing nearby passenger / driver (both apps)

Su made clear a key distinction in how ride requests were to be handled in Dollaride:

When a passenger presses "pick me up", the hail request should act more like a broadcast to nearby drivers than a 1-to-1 driver-passenger match. Essentially, only drivers of nearby passengers should be notified by making the passenger’s GPS location visible to driver in his map view, but all nearby drivers would have an opportunity to pickup any passenger(s) on a first-come, first-serve-basis.

Once the passenger enters the driver's unique code (from within their vehicle), their GPS location is no longer broadcasted to the other nearby drivers. Payment is then sent to the driver and the passenger’s ride begins.

Within a few months of launch, Dollaride pitched at, and won, a competition to gain entry into the Urban Future Lab incubator in Brooklyn and soon after went on to win the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership’s (DBP) Make It in Brooklyn Innovation Award for Rookie of the Year.

In 2020 Dollaride were named one of the top 100 businesses to invest in by Forbes Magazine and In November 2022, Dollaride was awarded $10 million from NYSERDA to implement CTAP (Clean Transit Access Program) to transition gas-powered shuttle vans in New York City to fully electric vehicles.