You could definitely start a non-profit building a site for helping people with this problem. Here's the idea: you have a court date, you can submit documentation to the service, and it will try to automatically purchase an uber for you wherever your location is. You could setup a profile ahead of time so all information can be verified and let people who need to get to the court decide on when/where to schedule their car. As I'm sure you're well aware of, this would mean having to be a little more flexible since the location where they would be picked up may not be easily predicted depending on the day. This is an interesting technical and UI/UX problem!
There are a lot of other interesting CS problems building a project like this because of the optimization problems you immediately hit: how can I most effectively distribute the uber fees to people who need them the most. Criteria could include: how many bus transfers they have before being able to get to the court house, how "fragile" this process could be (because of late buses, etc),
I guarantee if you could build an MVP in your free time and show it on this site, you should be able to raise some money, at least enough for an experiment to show the website works correctly and effectively helps people get to their court dates. If that works, I'm confident you could get enough donations to get this project off the ground permanently (well, until the drug problems are fixed).
Because drug enforcement has clogged up so much of our legal system, it is conceivable that building a system like this could end up saving the state some money on fees since it would make it easier for people to show up on time. Also, since you have a centralized system with data on all interactions, you could improve your distribution algorithms by making sure people don't end up at the court late, causing the system to be unnecessarily further burdened.
There are a lot of other interesting CS problems building a project like this because of the optimization problems you immediately hit: how can I most effectively distribute the uber fees to people who need them the most. Criteria could include: how many bus transfers they have before being able to get to the court house, how "fragile" this process could be (because of late buses, etc),
I guarantee if you could build an MVP in your free time and show it on this site, you should be able to raise some money, at least enough for an experiment to show the website works correctly and effectively helps people get to their court dates. If that works, I'm confident you could get enough donations to get this project off the ground permanently (well, until the drug problems are fixed).
Because drug enforcement has clogged up so much of our legal system, it is conceivable that building a system like this could end up saving the state some money on fees since it would make it easier for people to show up on time. Also, since you have a centralized system with data on all interactions, you could improve your distribution algorithms by making sure people don't end up at the court late, causing the system to be unnecessarily further burdened.