Homewood resident Kristen Moran is a mom of four, and her children go to four different schools. Her twins are on separate lacrosse teams and have practices that overlap by about 30 minutes. One of her daughters practices gymnastics.
“It gets kind of dicey, where you literally have to be at four different places at the same time,” Moran said.
Moran is the business development manager at CoolBus, which is a new app created by Vestavia residents John and Sarah Wright. The app that allows parents to connect to other parents for carpooling.
Here’s how it works: You open the app and, after syncing your contact to the app, you click “Find a ride.” You enter the to and from address of where you need a ride. You select how many of your children will need the ride. Then you enter the date and time of the ride so you can plan in advance and give parents time to offer a ride. You can also offer gas money to whomever gives a ride.
Once you submit your ride, you’ll be able to see other people within your contacts and extended circle who are also going to the same place at the same time. You can see how you’re connected to that person — you might not have that person in your contacts, but it could be your trusted friend’s contact (you can choose trusted friends in the app). You can request a ride from that person, and the other person can request or deny it (and the other person doesn’t know if you deny a request).
When the ride is approved, the two parents can use the chat function and discuss details of the ride.
If none of your contacts are available for the ride, you can also post the ride to a job board, where people from outside of your contact list can volunteer to drive for your children. This part is optional — if you want to keep your ride only visible to your contacts, then you can omit this part.
Moran shared a time before the CoolBus app was developed when the app would have come in handy. Her youngest was an infant, and her other three children were all students at Edgewood Elementary School at the time. They typically walked home from school.
Then at 2:50 p.m., five minutes before school dismissal, a huge thunderstorm erupted “out of nowhere,” Moran said.
“They weren’t allowing our kids to leave because it was dangerous,” she said. “So here I am at home with a sleeping newborn, and I’m like, ‘What am I going to do?’”
She frantically texted her other friends with children at Edgewood, but they weren’t responding — they, too, were in a panic, Moran said.
“If I had CoolBus, I could have gotten on and asked who was at the school and could give a ride to my kids,” she said. “We have push notifications, so someone would have seen it and said, ‘I’m here, Kristen, and I can grab your child.’”
CoolBus isn’t a rideshare service like Uber or Lyft. Parents can make sure only trusted contacts or mutual friends drive their children. Also unlike a rideshare service, CoolBus does best when rides are planned in advance.
There’s a subscription fee of $9.99 a month for the service, and offering gas money to drivers is an optional additional cost. For those who use the Homewood PTO code for CoolBus’ Dollars for Downloads program, one dollar from each month of subscription will go to the Homewood PTO.
Visit coolbus.com for more information. You can also download the app using your mobile phone’s app store.
