[stikfa]

I attend university in a small US town about ~2-3 hours from city life.

There is no public transit around here, so one of your best bets to get to the city (and back to university) is to find students with a car that are driving in your direction. The going rate that a student will charge you to let you ride with them is about $30.

Students post offers for rides (and requests) in a convoluted way: through a Facebook ridesharing group. Facebook is a terrible platform for this. The posts are not displayed chronologically. And even if they were, they offer rides for different dates which are impossible to sort; you have to manually scroll through the page and hope for the best while you wade through endless expired or irrelevant posts.

Apparently there used to be an app that people used at one point, but the developers graduated from school and I guess it stopped being supported. Anyway, I'd definitely like a better way of finding rides.

[llampx]

Something like blablacar?

[stikfa]

I don't think you'll get uni students to use something like that. Really just a filterable calendar that can somehow scrape info from the fbook groups and give me contact information would be wonderful.

But I've heard scraping facebook isn't a good idea, so... here we are.

[llampx]

blablacar and mitfahrgelegenheit.de were built primarily for poor-ish people and students. And these are sites/apps which have a good UX for the purpose of finding and booking rides, or offering rides. So I can't agree that you can't get uni students to use something like that. Maybe in the US where seemingly everyone has a car or doesn't need a ride very frequently.

Suggestion: try going on blablacar and booking a ride from Berlin to Munich, or Paris to Lyon. I think you'll find it quite straightforward.