Rutgers Senior’s $5 Campus Ride App Closed Spring With 300 Users

LERI (short for Let’s Ride), a ride-sharing app built by a Rutgers senior this spring, charges students $5 flat per campus trip and requires every driver to verify their university student ID and campus netID before posting a ride. The app closed its first test semester with more than 300 verified accounts and a pricing model that puts rides at roughly one-third of what Uber typically charges for the same New Brunswick routes, according to its developer.

Elliot Tamarkin, an incoming senior and Honors College Scholar in Rutgers’ School of Arts and Sciences, built the service around a simple observation from his freshman year: he was driving to class with empty seats while classmates waited at a packed bus stop, all headed to the same destination.

The Booking Model

The service operates as a ride marketplace: drivers post their route in advance, noting where they’re going, when they’re leaving, and how many seats they have open. Passengers browse those listings, choose a driver based on profile details and review history, and send a booking request. The driver reviews incoming requests and decides which to accept.

Rides can be booked up to 24 hours ahead, tying the service to class schedules rather than impulse. Payments process through Stripe, a third-party payment platform. Drivers keep $4 from each ride; 50 cents goes to Stripe and 50 cents funds operations at the company Tamarkin incorporated to run the service. The flat fare holds regardless of demand, so a ride during finals week costs the same as one on a quiet Tuesday in September.

The app is available on iOS through the App Store and covers all Rutgers-New Brunswick campuses, including Busch, Livingston, Cook/Douglass and College Avenue. The team built curated pickup and drop-off hotspots across each campus to reduce coordination time for both sides of a booking.

Who Gets In

Tamarkin’s four safety pillars govern every ride on the platform.

• Exclusivity: Only verified Rutgers students can create an account. Sign-up requires RUID (Rutgers University ID) and campus netID confirmation before anyone can post or book a ride.
• Social profiles: Before booking, a passenger can see the driver’s school, major, graduation year, and any campus social groups they belong to.
• Mandatory ratings: After every ride, both driver and passenger rate each other out of five stars. A written review is optional; the star rating is not.
• Mutual choice: Passengers browse available rides and select their driver. Drivers review each incoming request and decide whether to accept. Neither side is matched automatically.

The fourth pillar is the one Tamarkin said he emphasizes most. An additional filter extends that logic: female passengers can choose to see only rides offered by female drivers, and female drivers can limit incoming requests to female passengers. The mandatory ratings layer adds a running reference network on top; every review on file was written by someone who was verified before their first booking.

What Academy Bus Lines Inherits

According to the university, Rutgers runs the largest university transportation system in the country, a fleet of 60 buses serving between 55,000 and 70,000 students, faculty and staff each day across the New Brunswick campuses. A University Senate resolution, passed on behalf of student advocacy group OverRide, put the system’s documented complaints into writing: unpredictable driver breaks, overcrowding, inconsistent arrivals and departures, and inadequate lighting at stops.

Students have catalogued those frustrations in petitions and student government filings for years. Overcrowding hits hardest on Cook/Douglass routes, where buses travel through city streets and Route 18; during peak morning hours, students have reported that the trip between campuses can stretch from 15 minutes to over an hour depending on traffic.

Academy Bus Lines, based in Hoboken, New Jersey, takes over New Brunswick operations on July 1, 2026, under a 20-year contract running through June 2046. The company’s announcement of the Rutgers agreement listed existing university clients: Boston University, Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University and NYU, among others. Academy held the same New Brunswick contract from 2001 to 2011, then lost it in a competitive rebid; the new arrangement is more than twice as long as the original.

A separate pilot launches July 20: direct service connecting the Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences (RBHS) building on Busch campus with the new Health and Life Sciences Exchange (HELIX) district in downtown New Brunswick, home to the new Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. Rutgers’ Department of Transportation Services posted the route details: buses run from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., arriving every 35 minutes. The pilot is the first real data point that will tell students what Academy’s reliability actually looks like before the full fall semester arrives.

A Bus Stop in Freshman Year

The second semester of his freshman year, Tamarkin had a car on campus. He was driving to class one morning when he passed a bus stop that was packed. He recognized some of the faces standing there.

The bus was especially packed that day, and I just looked at some faces… and I felt bad for them. Then I get to class and I recognize the faces… in the same class as me. And I was like, ‘Wait, they were going from the same place as me, to the same place as me, and I was driving past them with empty seats in my car.

The observation became the product. Building it took a team. Tamarkin credits Ankit Nath as the front-end developer and Kartik Marathe as the back-end developer, along with other contributors who helped shape the product through its early iterations.

Building more than the first version needed was the team’s biggest challenge, Tamarkin said. They had constructed a complex ride-cancellation logic system that he eventually cut from the initial release. “LERI is a very dense idea, and there’s a lot of ways it can go,” he said. Shipping with fewer features and updating faster kept the product from stalling while a more complete build would have taken months longer to reach students.

Connor Walker, a recent Rutgers Business School graduate, handles marketing through the app’s Instagram presence. His reels filmed at Rutgers bus stops, encouraging students to try the app instead of waiting for the bus, have consistently pulled thousands of views per post and driven early sign-ups.

Campus Apps Beyond Rutgers

The service fits a pattern building at universities across the country, one that predates smartphone apps and tends to emerge wherever campus bus systems consistently fall short of what students need.

Peer Networks and Informal Roots

At North Carolina State University, students have coordinated rides for years through a Facebook group called NCSU Beepers, posting requests and advertising availability in real time. The University of North Carolina at Wilmington launched its own peer service, the Boone Student Beeper, in 2011, when Uber had no coverage in the area. At East Carolina University, two nursing students started an independent ride service in 2024.

None of those efforts required venture money or App Store listings. They required students with cars, students without reliable rides, and a communication channel both could already reach. What connects them is a bus schedule that consistently moved too slowly for the schedules students needed to keep.

The informal campus ride culture has also surfaced something commercial apps don’t offer: the expectation that the driver is a peer. Campus networks start from existing social trust. Every participant is on the same campus, enrolled at the same institution, and carries some accountability to it. Formalizing that trust through verification and ratings is the next step most of these services eventually take.

From Informal to Funded

The more recent generation of campus ride projects has attracted real capital. A University of Notre Dame student startup raised $300,000 to launch Desi, a subscription-based ride-hailing service that employs college students at an hourly rate and provides rides at fares below what Uber charges. Desi launched at Notre Dame, Saint Mary’s College and Holy Cross in fall 2023, led by three Notre Dame students. The University of Iowa’s Volta, built on that campus, now runs at 16 universities across the Midwest and Texas, operating on a driver subscription model that has carried it well past its founding school.

The three formalized apps sit at different points on that curve:

The Rutgers service charges per ride, keeps the peer-to-peer marketplace structure, and doesn’t employ its drivers.

The Expansion Plan

Spring 2026 was the test. More than 300 students cleared the full verified threshold during the semester; the service’s website now lists more than 600 signed up across all stages of verification. Two Rutgers fraternities, ChiPsi and SigmaPi, partnered with the platform during the test period, giving it an early foothold in organized campus social networks alongside the Instagram outreach.

His stated next goal is bringing the model to other universities, serving students elsewhere who face the same commute gap his classmates do. Day-to-day, he said, the focus stays on improving service for the current Rutgers community before scaling.

He doesn’t measure success against the bus system. “If the Rutgers bus system becomes so good to the point where LERI is no longer needed, that’s a win,” he said.