Just when you figured San Francisco couldn t get any more congested we learn that a new fleet of techie-hauling buses are about to be unleashed.
Many neighborhoods throughout the 49-square-mile city are already a nightmare to drive through, especially during morning and afternoon commute hours. Thanks to the tech boom that s engulfed the City the past two years, getting from one end of town to the other can take up to an hour as you get stuck in endless gridlock. And it s not just the cars, buses, trolleys and streetcars, either. You re also competing with kamikaze bicyclists, insane cabbies and their estranged brethren driving for Uber, Sidecar and Lyft.
Well, get ready for even more gridlock.
According to a post in Ars Technica, a new private luxury commuter bus line is coming to town. The cost? Six bucks for a roughly three-mile ride.
At its Wednesday launch, Leap will only operate four buses (with one more in reserve) during commuting hours, focusing on giving rides from the Marina neighborhood in the city s north, going southeast to downtown in the morning, and the reverse in the evening. There s no fixed schedule—the buses are just constantly rolling at 10 to 15 minute intervals, and passengers can check the iOS or Web apps to see when they will arrive. (Ars first profiled Leap in March 2014.)
Leap is betting that riders are willing to pay nearly three times what a ride on a local Muni bus costs, and a fair bit less than what a taxi (or its newer cousins, Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar) would charge for a similar journey. By comparison, the same ride on a San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (Muni) bus costs just $2.25. Muni also doesn t require downloading an app (or printing a paper ticket at home), provides information and schedules in multiple languages, and complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act. But Muni doesn t have an on-board manager who will bring you iced coffee, either. For now, Leap is hardly a threat to Muni, which serves 702,000 passengers a day. At full capacity, Leap will only serve a few hundred people.
In a Starbucks chat with Ars, Leap s CEO Kyle Kirchoff said his company s motivations are pure:
We just don t want to get in the way of other operations, our goal is to make the city work better overall. We have tried to design an experience that takes the hassle out of commuting, and part of that is not having a crowded space.
Kirchhoff isn t the only one willing to take a chance on his own company: major Silicon Valley venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz have already invested $2.5 million. (By comparison, Muni s annual budget is $851 million.)
Leap is providing a technological solution to an age-old problem: the commute, Billy Draper, of Draper Associates, an investor in Leap, told Ars by e-mail.
The beauty isn t just in the buses themselves, but in the app, Draper continued. Reducing the amount of unnecessary stoppage, being able to track exactly how much time is left before you arrive at your stop, adding social components to interact with other passengers and coordinate with friends, and then eventually planning dynamic routes based on user demand and concentration rather than because that s the way it s always been —those are the things we re excited about.
Unnecessary stoppage?
Good luck with that.
So kick back with that iced coffee and enjoy the gridlock.
Credit: SiliconBeat.com
