Magic Bus is a new startup out of Y Combinator that hopes to end many Bay space commuter’s gradual, soul-crushing day by day power down the 101 with a scheduled, WiFi-enabled, personal bus gadget to transport them any place from San Francisco all the means right down to Sunnyvale.
There are a variety of startups keen on carpooling in the Bay area – Chariot, Shuddle and even Uber and Lyft among them, but co-founder Chris Upjohn believes Magic Bus deals one thing uniquely totally different. reasonably than specializing in transportation within a city, his startup supports the ride between cities.
“So we take individuals lengthy distances that they’d had been using,” Upjohn defined to me over the phone.
One instance of this could be anyone who starts out in Pacific Heights however needs to move to an place of work in Redwood city daily. “They’d must take Muni to Caltrain and then Caltrain to Redwood metropolis after which the MTA or one thing like that. So they’ve these in reality painful multi-level transit commutes,” Upjohn mentioned.
Magic Bus commuters taking an early morning journey.
Lyft Line and Uber Pool supply a option to skip the public transport jenga inside city limits but don’t presently offer that option for commuters going from one city to the next. on the other hand, on Magic Bus, the rider can agenda a trip and connect to these going a similar route for one continuous journey to work in much less time than it might take to head throughout the quite a lot of Bay house public transportation options.
Upjohn made a equivalent system for his fellow school students, nevertheless it used to be his own tense shuttle from San Francisco to Menlo Park in a finance job that gave him the idea to create Magic Bus.
“It was a problem that me for a very long time. How is it we’re still all alone in our cars riding to work? It made no experience to me,” Upjohn stated.
Magic Bus is pretty new, but Upjohn instructed me it already has “hundreds” of people signed up to make use of it already and Upjohn sees the platform as part of a bigger motion round good cities.
“after we think about how we’d like to contribute to smarter cities of the longer term we’d like to reduce the congestion that we see,” Upjohn mentioned. “We’d wish to do away with the need for folk to personal vehicles and use Magic Busses for commuting and services like Uber and Lyft for in the city.”
Upjohn didn’t want to comment on any future partnerships with either ridesharing service, however did mention “pursuing that vision.”
those all in favour of signing up for Magic Bus for a day by day journey up and down the Peninsula can subscribe to the beta at Magicbus.io. TechCrunch readers can check out the provider totally free on their first shuttle the use of the promo code TCridesfree.
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