Carpool Kids: Family Calendar

This wonderful, helpful app makes scheduling and communicating so easy. Last year I was in a carpool where we just had a text group, which is fine if schedules never change and everything is always the same. But when some kids don’t need a ride because of an extracurricular on one day, and swapping dates when people travel there where times I wasn’t sure if everybody remembered the changes and I felt rude reminding people if they didn’t need reminding, but yet I didn’t want kids without rides even more. This app took all that worry away and lets you make changes in advance that are clear to everyone. Love, love, love this app.

This app and corresponding website does very little to help plan carpools. Trying to coordinate a carpool for kids group activities, like sports teams, using Carpool Kids is more challenging than using a google docs spreadsheet. In fact, we’ve reverted to using google docs. Google docs does what this app does but better. Add people to google docs and turn on edit notifications. Bingo. Same functionality as this app except with google docs you get more flexibility. The complexity of managing a carpool for kids on teams or other group activities is matching kids to drivers. Imagine for a moment you have a group as small as 5 kids (let alone 12 like our carpool). 5 kids won’t fit into anything other than a minivan. Even if one parent of group has a minivan they can’t always drive kids to the group activity at 3pm. The minivan owner works. Thus the entire reason for the carpool in the first place. A paid for carpool service for kids needs to at the very least track the number of kids needing a ride to drivers (plural) available on particular days that have enough seating capacity. Email or text alerts to parents that drivers are still needed for X number of kids now becomes possible for specific days or events. This app doesn’t even come close. After spending some time testing a dummy carpool you’ll quickly discover that only being able to add a single driver to a given event is debilitating. Furthermore, looking at reviews and the developers own help system being able to add more than one driver to a single event has been discussed three years ago. Given that kind of time there’s clearly no interest in further developing the app. This was probably a junior high school kids effort to make some money for college and is now in college, our out of college working on other more exciting endeavors.

I love this app. But it's solution to our carpool problem is very clunky. We have 11 kids, so they obviously can't get into one car. So we have to create multiple events for the same event. The problem is that sometimes we can fit them all in 3 cars, but other times it takes 5. We don't know how many cars are needed ahead of time. So we still have to discuss back and forth until we gone in on a solution...even tho we still use the app. Our lives would be much simpler if multiple drivers could sign up for an event and each creates a number of available seat slots. Please please please add this feature soon. As it stands the app simplifies already simple carpools. Please help simplify our complicated carpool!!