San Francisco appears to have an ongoing beef with every conceivable form of transportation available. Despite a nearly endless variety of options for ways to get us from A to point B, our geographical layout seems to demand increasingly new and better ways to get around. Haters and champions fight with equal fervor for and against ridesharing, bicycling, tech buses, Muni buses, BART trains, trolleys, Segways, private cars, carsharing, taxis, even walking. Well, perhaps it won’t solve all of our problems, but a ride sharing shuttle service called Chariot that emerged earlier this year to try and meet commuters in the transit battlefield is currently shuttling thousands to and from work.
Chariot is essentially a shuttle bus service dedicated to creating new transit lines that commuters feel are desperately needed but not serviced by Muni buses or trains. The company proposes that instead of paying taxi/Uber prices, or transferring multiple bus lines, you pay $4 a ride (or $93 for a monthly pass) and catch one of their shuttle buses. Chariot’s efforts to run on-time shuttle buses at twice the price of Muni have been successful — their marketing manager Lynn Tao told us that they have already recorded over 35,000 paid rides, with 2,000 rides a week between their first two routes, which run from the Marina to downtown, and from the Marina, Cow Hollow, and Pac Heights to SOMA/Caltrain.
Their method of choosing new routes is pretty innovative. They use Tilt, a crowdsourcing website, to sell discounted monthly passes for a proposed new route through western SOMA. Once enough passes have been sold, the route is established. “We think this is a great way to take the risk off our table and get the community involved in putting together better commuting options for themselves,” CEO Ali Vahabzadeh told TechCrunch. The only real caveat is that chariot users must buy a pass online beforehand and cannot simply hand over cash once on the shuttle — oh, and there’s no mobile app yet (although they’re working on it).
Although crowdfunding routes is a new idea, private bus lines were around back in the 1970s in San Francisco, via family run jitney lines which competed with Muni right up until Proposition K banned the resale of transit medallions in 1978. Only time will tell if Chariot can compete with Muni, which despite its slow speed, unreliability, colorful characters, and crowded nature, is overwhelmingly supported by San Francisco voters, who just approved a $500 million transportation (and road) improvement bond through Prop A.
Via TechCrunch, photo by Charles Haynes/Flickr
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