For USC students, finding a ride back to campus from LAX can be frustrating. Three USC students have a solution. USC juniors James McColl, Toan Huynh and Max Albright designed their first original app “Shairport” which launched on the App Store on Wednesday.
“We ourselves would be at LAX, and we’d be trying to get a Lyft back, and they’d be sometimes $70 or $80,” McColl said. “We thought, what if we could implement an easy and secure way for USC students to find other USC students so they could share that ride back to campus?”
To use the app, users must be near LAX’s Lyft pickup area, LAX-it, and log in with their USC email address to make sure all riders are only USC students. According to the app’s Instagram account, Lyft and Uber rides from LAX back to USC cost up to $70. With Shairport, the founders hope to cut that cost in half for students.
While the app is in early stages, some USC students already seem to like the idea of a shared riding system for traveling back to campus.
“I definitely think it’s gonna be beneficial because the cost of an Uber from LAX is sometimes really expensive,” said Iliyan Valani, a sophomore majoring in biology and data science. “Sometimes you can get away with having a $30 Uber and sometimes it’s $70 or $100.”
McColl, Huynh and Albright came up with the idea for the app in an introduction to software development course and pitched it for a project. The idea went from a pitch, to a website and eventually to an app available for download on the App Store.
“We noticed that people don’t want to go on websites and make this ticket,” Huynh said. “We thought the website itself wasn’t the path to take and we knew that iOS was the way to go.”
McColl, Huynh and Alright pitched the idea to Lyft to see if they were interested and the three of them are in the process of discussing a potential partnership. They believe it could serve as an improvement to Lyft’s shared ride program because of the fact that you are guaranteed to be paired with another USC student.
Switching from a website to an app came with its challenges as the group originally built the website to help people get rides from campus to LAX. They soon learned that the demand surrounded issues getting rides from the airport back to campus.
“We had to basically learn a whole new tech stack and a bunch of languages,” Albright said. “But it was also way more rewarding because we were learning so much. It was a fun experience, but it definitely was not easy.”
With safety being the top priority for the group, McColl, Huynh and Albright are open to looking for more methods to ensure students do not have to worry about any potential safety concerns.
“We’re putting in additional measures in the next round of rolling out the app,” McColl said. “Whether that be just an additional support link that you can contact if something is going wrong with your ride, or if you get paired with someone who is not reaching out or being responsive, you can easily create another ticket to find another person to go with.”
USC students also think the app could help create a safer experience for students trying to travel back to campus.
“I think the app will be really good,” said Athena Diamantidis, a senior majoring in computer science major. “It would probably help a lot of low-income people and I think it would also be good in terms of safety.”
As the app continues to grow and get more traction, the founders hope to expand and involve other colleges in Los Angeles.
“We actually want to expand to other colleges around L.A.,” Huynh said. “I know a lot of students travel to LAX from UCLA, LMU and other schools, so that’s in the future for us.”
As more users get access to the app, McColl, Huynh and Albright are looking for any feedback they can get that will improve the experience for everyone.