CowTrip helps people understand cost-benefit analysis of commuting

To understand CowTrip founder Terrance MacGregor’s simultaneous hatred and fascination with commuting, you need only know one thing: he once, using a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, calculated that all the time he spent driving to and from work each day could have been put toward another five-year, 40-hours-a-week career.
He found himself even more frustrated when he realized all that drive time subtracted from the available hours he had to spend with his three children.
“I always feel like I should be doing more with my kids, and it just really irked me to think that two hours [spent commuting] I was gone,” he says. So MacGregor, 34, a former software engineer with AT&T, developed CowTrip, an application that enables all frustrated commuters better comprehend the costs incurred from time spent behind the wheel.
Try the service for free here.

“I don’t want to make commuting better—I want to absolutely kill it altogether if I can,” he says.
Upon signing up, users fill out a basic (and secured) profile where they enter such information as their home address and the amount of money they make per hour. Using Google Maps, CowTrip follows a person’s commute, and then uses algorithms to display analytics on any commute: the potential income lost commuting, a driver’s potential weight gained, the percent chance a person will make social bonds in their community—even a driver’s carbon footprint and the amount of wattage they’re absorbing via sun exposure. A 10-point happiness index, calculated based on the time spent driving, gradually adjusts downward as commutes become longer. Every commuter is represented by an animated cow (who, if stuck in long commutes, puts on a frowny face).

MacGregor, who lives in Carroll County, attended Johns Hopkins University for his master’s degree in computer science. He has been in the Baltimore area since 2007, a natural fit because it’s a “great area for technical jobs,” he says (and his wife’s family lives close by).
MacGregor developed an initial version of CowTrip at the 2010 Baltimore Hackathon, but revisited his concept in earnest this spring before releasing the beta version a couple months ago. An Android app is available, and the iPhone app will be released in about two weeks. Right now, MacGregor and his small team of contract developers are weighing the usefulness of the analytics provided to users on the back-end. “Our engine of growth for [CowTrip] is really going to be viral, so we need the right metrics in place before we build anything else,” he says.
CowTrip right now has some 100 users, and MacGregor thinks that more people will use it as they hear about it through friends (or “#commutingsucks” Twitter hash tags), but he needs more time to assess what metrics users find valuable.
“There’s no reason to stay [on CowTrip] yet, so we have to figure out how to make it sticky,” MacGregor says.
CowTrip’s herd feature could be one such sticking point. Using GPS, CowTrip users who choose to make their addresses public (address within a certain mile-radius—never exact locations) can discover commuters near them, and then use CowTrip’s built-in messaging feature to set up carpools.
“Think of the number of business contacts you could make commuting,” MacGregor says. “Think about the stuff you could share on your drive.”
While, for now, CowTrip is helping people alleviate some daily frustration, MacGregor has bigger ambitions for the application.
“What we really want to do is change behavior,” he says. “Educate, change behavior, give people tools, and help them hopefully make their lives better.”
To learn more, watch Terrance MacGregor present at June’s Baltimore TechBreakfast.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kZJuUJ1sh4&version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0]