A Private Bus Company Debuts in Detroit

A Private Bus Company Debuts in Detroit

May 7, 2012 2:00 PM Text Size: A . A . A

For every person who buys a ride, we’re going to give someone else in need a free ride to work. At some point in the future we want to run free buses in neighborhoods that need them most.

Most companies should have a social mission; gone are the times when a business can simply get by with just making money and not giving back in some wayâ€"not if that business really wants to matter. We wanted to have a social mission and use the resources we have in the best way possible. Our resources are technology and social media. Most bus companies aren’t digitally aware; they’re curmudgeons when it comes to this stuff.

All of them run on biodiesel that we are producing and harvesting ourselves from local restaurants. The buses will also launch with live tracking, so riders can load up the route on any smartphone and see the buses in real time. The system we designed is basically Google Maps with a custom-built solution that is very easy to use. We’re also working on adaptive routing, where riders can request to have the bus come near them. This is still in prototype; I don’t know of any dynamic-routing transit system that’s been used on this scale before.

There will also be two iPads on boardâ€"one for payment (we accept both credit cards and cash) and one mounted at the front with our Belly loyalty program. Belly allows riders to check in every time they ride the bus, racking up points for things like gift cards to use at businesses along the route. Oh, and the first person to rack up 10,000 points gets a bus pass for a decade and a bus named after them.

There’s only 700,000 [people] in the city proper of Detroit. That’s nothing compared to the surrounding suburbs where there’s upwards of 15 million people. Eventually we’re going to send buses out to the suburbs to connect them to the city.

We also want to send a bus to the airportâ€"there’s currently no such public service. But we have to fill all these schemes in an intelligent and decisive manner, with routes that have a real, dedicated need behind them.

I think ones like this, yes, but there are a handful of companies out there that will take on a bus system and privatize it but it’ll be worse than the public system. They’ll pull money out and keep it for themselves. I think you have to hand it off to private companies that have social good as their private objective.

Basically buses suck. Even when they’re good, they suck. So we’re trying to make it less un-funâ€"with music and great paint jobs and making the buses really easy to ride.

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