Students students go home to the Bay Area and Los Angeles every break, and most of them do it alone in a car or on a peak-price flight or bus. Seat Sherpa Campus gives Transportation Services a branded, student-verified carpool board with safety, payments, and reporting already built, for one flat annual fee.
Zimride, the paid campus ride board most UC and CSU campuses ran for a decade, was shut down by Enterprise at the end of 2020. What replaced it is a regional commute-matching tool built for the daily drive to campus, and a Facebook group for everything else. The trip students take most, home for the weekend or the break, has no verified place to happen.
campus.seatsherpa.app with preset routes, the live ride list, and the ride request board where students post the trip they need and drivers get pinged.
Students who confirm a campus .edu email get a “Campus verified” badge and a students-only filter, so a rider can choose to travel only with classmates.
Drivers must have a current driver’s license on file before they can post. Every account is phone-verified. Payment happens in the app, never cash or Venmo. In-app chat, first-name-only display, and two-way ratings.
Rides posted, seats filled, trips by corridor, and CO₂ avoided, delivered to the department each quarter. Aggregates only, no student identities.
A student email you can forward, a flyer, QR posters for the transportation office and residence halls, and a tabling visit within the first month.
Free for students. Drivers set a price capped by Seat Sherpa’s cost-share formula (IRS mileage rate divided by seats), so it is gas-splitting, never a business.
Each campus page opens on the corridors its students actually drive. These already have live route pages on seatsherpa.app.
| Regional commute match (511, Cruz511, NorCal GO) | Facebook / GroupMe ride group | Seat Sherpa Campus | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Built for | The daily drive to campus | Whatever gets posted | Intercity trips: weekends, breaks, holidays |
| Who can post | The general public in the region | Anyone admitted to the group | Phone-verified accounts; drivers with a current license on file; campus-verified badge |
| Payment | Not handled | Cash or Venmo, arranged in DMs | In the app; the rider is charged and the driver is paid after the trip |
| Pricing | Not handled | Whatever the driver asks | Driver sets it under a mileage-based cost-share cap |
| If plans change | Not handled | Ghosting | Cancellation and refund rules, ratings both ways |
| What the school sees | Regional totals at best | Nothing | Quarterly campus report |
First three campuses to sign for 2026–27. Everything above, plus a say in what the campus page becomes.
Same product. Renews yearly; cancel at year end with no penalty.
Flat fee, invoiced once. No per-student or per-ride charges to the school. Under the $10,000 UC low-value purchase limit, so a department can buy directly without quotes; CSU policy requires no competition below $100,000. For scale, Zimride charged campuses about $10,000 a year.
Seat Sherpa is a California carpool marketplace for intercity trips, live on iOS, Android, and the web. Drivers post the empty seats on a drive they are already making; riders book a seat and split the gas. It exists because the founder missed a Tahoe trip for want of a seat, and because the train between the Bay Area and Los Angeles still does not.
Justin Tang, founder · justin@seatsherpa.app · seatsherpa.app