Project
Pedicab
A phone-first tool for pedicab drivers — a clickable prototype of the thing I think ought to exist, with a live site coming soon.
What it is
A tool for pedicab drivers, built around the four things a driver actually needs. Where the work is: an events view that also tells you whether pedicabs are even allowed to stage there, and where. The permit maze: a plain-English, same-shape-in-every-city guide to the paperwork each city buries. Basic maintenance. And a feed of on-the-ground intel from other drivers.
It switches between sample cities, because the cross-city view — the same driver working different towns — is the thing nothing else offers from the driver’s side. Everything that exists today serves the pedicab company or the advertiser; this is meant to be on the driver’s side, and free.
Where the idea came from
The idea isn’t originally mine. It came from someone I know who drives a pedicab for a living — someone who lives the friction I can only describe: the events you never hear about, the staging rules you can’t find, the permit process that’s different and opaque in every city. I’m the outsider on this one. I’m just the person who can build it.
The permit guide is the wedge. It’s the least glamorous piece and the most useful one to start with: it changes slowly, drivers share permit information freely, it can be built from public records without needing a crowd first, and it’s a real pain — especially for a driver hitting a new city cold.
How it keeps itself current
The hard part of a thing like this isn’t building it — it’s keeping it true. Events change every week; whether pedicabs are welcome changes from one event to the next; permits drift. No one person can hand-maintain forty cities of live calendars, and a static scrape rots within a month.
So the site maintains itself. Every morning an automated pipeline pulls fresh events from each city’s public sources, and a language model does the part that actually matters to a driver — reading each event and judging whether pedicabs are allowed, where to stage, whether it’s worth the ride — then checks its own work against a strict schema before anything goes live. It’s the piece AI newly makes possible: freshness at a scale a solo builder could never keep up by hand. It’s running now, pulling from real public calendars across three cities.
There’s a deliberate bit of honesty wired in, too. The machine-written judgments stay marked as unverified until a human signs off, and a guard makes certain that a bad data day can never wipe the live calendar out from under the drivers relying on it.
Where it stands
What’s clickable today is the prototype — sample cities, a placeholder name — but with a real, working freshness pipeline already behind the “find work” tab. It’s real enough to click around and react to, which is the point of a prototype. A live site is coming soon.