Replacing the paratransit spreadsheets

Paratransit is the door-to-door service for riders who can't use the regular buses. Ours is small: two or three drivers and somewhere between eight and fifteen rides a day. It ran on spreadsheets.

Why the spreadsheets had to go

A spreadsheet is fine for a list. It's bad at a schedule that changes all day. Every ride gets typed by hand, and every report starts with counting rows.

What the app does

• A daily schedule that shows every ride and its status.
• A passenger list, so a repeat rider is two clicks and not a retyped address.
• Driver assignment for each ride.
• Mileage and drive time filled in from Google Maps directions, with a manual override for when the map is wrong.
• Reports in the shape our federal reporting needs, and an export to Excel for anyone who still wants the spreadsheet.
• A phone view for drivers that shows only their rides for the day.
• A tab for the vehicles themselves.

Under the hood it's plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript in the browser, with Node.js and Express on the server and a SQLite database, which is a single file.

The part I'm oddly proud of

I didn't have admin rights on my work computer, so I couldn't install Node.js the normal way. The first version ran from a USB drive with a portable copy of Node on it. Plug it in, double-click and the app was running. That let me keep building and showing it to people without waiting on an install.

What you won't see here

Rider information is protected, and none of it will ever appear on this site. When I post screenshots, every name and address in them will be made up.