Step aside Uber, Lyft, and Muni. There’s a new transportation service in town, and it’s pretty damn fancy.
Leap, a private bus company, launched its first route in San Francisco today. The Express Service — or Lombard Express, as it’s known in Leap’s press kit — will travel between Lombard Street in the Marina and downtown. There won’t be many stops, just four along the Lombard Street Corridor and four downtown between Clay and Howard. Buses arrive every 10–15 minutes on weekdays, from 7am — 10am, and again from 5pm — 8pm. It takes about 25 minutes for the bus to reach downtown.
Rides cost $6 each, or $5 if you buy in bulk, and the whole system is streamlined to be prepaid. Riders can scan their smartphone for the ride or use Bluetooth for automatic check-in upon boarding. If you forgot your phone (or are in the mood to go analog), you can also print your pass.
According to the company’s press release, the buses have three seating areas, which include “a social perimeter for chatting with neighbors, spacious front-facing seats for reading a book or catching up on a podcast, and a laptop bar for getting a jump start on work.” In true private bus style, all vehicles also have WiFi, USB outlets, barstool seats, and food for purchase, including Noosa yogurt and Happy Moose juice. There’s also a social network aspect to the ride, since the app offers an opt-in feature where you can share more info about yourself and learn more about your fellow passengers.
Clearly, the service is geared toward a certain kind of commuter. Leap’s promotional images show a flurry of youthful faces, tattoos, leather jackets, ripped tights, and backwards hats. And the bus interiors look like the love child of a Blue Bottle café (will it surprise you to learn they sell their coffee on the bus?) and the VIP section of a SOMA nightclub. It’s tempting to write off Leap as yet another bougie, techie luxury, except it does seem to fill a need for a particular type of resident. San Francisco is brimming with commuters who would gladly shell out $12 for a bottle of juice during their morning ride, as well as 20-and-30-somethings who want to upgrade from Muni (leather seats, anyone?) without opting for a private car with surge pricing.
According to TechCrunch, Leap is backed with $2.5 million from Andreessen Horowitz (a venture capital firm), Index Ventures, Slow Ventures, and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.
The city doesn’t have a great track record with private bus services, and it feels like a matter of time before this one finds a way to alienate locals, but at least Leap is trying not to inconvenience anyone — for now, anyway. The service will initially run four buses (with one in reserve), and won’t use existing Muni stops. What Leap represents will undoubtedly irk many, but if it does end up being more reliable, convenient, and clean than Muni, and consistently cheaper than Uber or Lyft, we’ll see a lot more blue buses roaming the streets soon.
[h/t Techcrunch; photo courtesy of Leap Transit]
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