Like many public servants navigating the challenges of the federal government’s return-to-office mandate , Pierre-Paul Roy faced a parking hurdle when a policy commonly known as RTO-4 required public servants to work from their offices four days per week.
When workers were previously asked to be in the office three days per week, Roy shared a private parking spot with another employee in a federal building in downtown Ottawa. They split the cost and used the spot on separate days. Once every two weeks, when their days in office overlapped, Roy would find parking elsewhere.
That arrangement, however, was no longer feasible when the government bumped the in-office requirements up to four days per week. Roy and his friend would often drive to the office on the same days from opposite sides of town and in separate vehicles.
“Surely, there is someone living near me who is (also) driving to the same area at the same time,” Roy asked himself.
Inspiration struck, and Roy took matters into his own hands by launching iHopOn, a car-pooling phone application made for verified public servants. The ride-sharing app matches public servants based on their locations and work hours.
“I wasn’t expecting it to kick off the way it did,” Roy said of iHopOn, the app that was launched on Sept. 8, with 1,100 federal public servants registering accounts and more than 750 users ready to be matched with carpooling partners.
After verifying government email addresses, the app matches users based on work schedules, home and office locations and proximity from one another. Users can also indicate whether they want to drive, ride as a passenger or share driving responsibilities.
The app even matches users based on their preference to talk during the drive or to have a quiet ride.
“It puts people’s needs all in the same app,” said public servant Stephanie Laflamme-Bertrand, who had met Roy through her husband years ago, but she only recently discovered his ride-sharing app and signed up for it.
The app doesn’t necessarily mean workers will be carpooling with strangers, Laflamme-Bertrand said.
“You might suddenly find one of your friends on there and you are like: ‘Oh I didn’t know you were open to carpooling and that this is your schedule.’ So I think it’s a good news for public servants, for sure,” she said.
Laflamme-Bertrand, another co-worker and Roy were matched on the app and will be car-pooling together to their offices.
According to Laflamme-Bertrand, the app is efficient and a “really great” initiative by Roy.
“It’s nice to find people who are in your area with similar commute times (and) similar schedules,” she said.
“RTO-4 has been difficult for a lot of people, in terms of adjustment work-life balance. And (the app) makes it easier for everybody.”
When using the app for himself at the beginning, Roy had three potential matches that “scored 100 per cent” on the app, meaning those individuals lived less than a half-kilometre from his residence in Embrun, worked in the same building downtown and had almost the same work schedule.
For Roy, those details can make the difference. The public servant of 21 years says public servants previously had to rely on Facebook groups and Reddit threads to find rides. But those options can make it difficult to find someone who matches schedules and routes.
This was not Roy’s first attempt at the idea of a car-pooling assist. He built an early version of iHopOn in 2008, shortly after joining the public service , hand-coding the website and spending up to a year building it.
“It was a lot of work back then,” he said. That app, open to everyone, it initially attracted users but eventually faded.
This time, his target audience was focused: public servants. Roy spent much of his 2026 summer vacation building the new version of iHopOn with Artificial Intelligence coding help, determined to have the app ready by September.
“My wife was like, ‘Take a break,’” he said.
By the time the app launched, there was still no solution for commuting and parking issues public servants that faced in light of RTO-4.
“I couldn’t believe that there wasn’t an app for this yet.”
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