<i>Leap buses are not also currently accessible to wheelchair-using or disabled passengers, but Kirchhoff plans to add that in future buses.</i><p>They redesigned the entire bus interior from the ground up and didn't include this? Surely if you are going to rebuild your fleet before you start, it is insane not to do the work then. Doing it in the future will be far more expensive and is a difficult decision to make, given you will have to pull a presumably profitable bus from a route for each revamp.<p>(edited for spelling)
Wow. All you guys need in SF is <i>more</i> ticketing systems. There is already what? 3? 4? In places like e.g. Germany, you have <i>one</i> ticketing system being serviced by different companies that all bid for the slots based on their costs (including the official railway service DB) without inconviniencing the customer.
With the obvious disclaimers about the TOC and potential safety issues I do like the overall idea. I commute roughly 50 minutes each way by train and prefer it a lot over going by car even if a car is more felxible. The major benefit for me is that I can read (or use my laptop).<p>I think the "open area" and especially the "opt in share info stuff" has the potential to be the most game changing. I'd really enjoy commuting even more if I had the option to socialize with interesting people. The typical train layout and general no-contact atmosphere on trains isn't really helping much.<p>Especially in SV I can imagine some quite interesting discussions and talks while commuting. In fact I could imagine riding that bus even if I didn't have to travel which is a pretty good sign.<p>Aside from "not a travel company/safety" concerns my biggest issue is scale. Doesn't look like a ton of people fit on these buses. It might also work better for longer routes than the typical inner city stuff (plenty of people living outside core SV that wouldn't mind long route buses I'd guess)
I'll be interested to see how this works from afar in New York. To my mind it's likely to just make for more traffic and not take a sizable number of cars off the road, but I'd love to be proven wrong.
When tech VCs get into the public transit business, that's a good indicator that we are in a bubble. I was in SF for the 1999-2000 bubble. This reminds me a lot of that.<p>There isn't much upside in a business like this, but there is a huge amount of hassle (just wait until someone sues them for ADA incompliance, and they will).<p>Note also the skin tone of the featured passengers. As someone who rides public transit in SF and NY daily, I'd rather see attention focused on improving public transit, versus privileged white people who live in the Marina transit.
Can someone please explain the benefit of having Wifi on a bus? I know for some the bus ride may be long, especially if you're going from the SoMA to the Outer Sunset or Richmond. But in most cases I've used MUNI there it's 10 minute bus ride, even going from the Haight to Soma. There is an argument to be made for getting work done, but how much work care you possibly going to get done on a 10-15 minute bus ride?
I'm interested to see the next evolutionary step in transit.<p>I would have gone with the "dollar van" model would be a better entry. Cargo vans are less expensive to own/maintain than busses, more nimble, and use less fuel.<p>Either way, more options is great for the consumer.
I like the marshrutka private busses prevalent in Russia:<p><a href="http://www.saint-petersburg.com/transport/marshrutka/" rel="nofollow">http://www.saint-petersburg.com/transport/marshrutka/</a>
It seems like San Francisco is one of the few places where you can have a company completely fail, only to see it revamp its product in a way that it will probably completely fail again.<p>While I can't speak for San Francisco's bus system, everything about this product video screams to me that the solution that is being provided here does not actually solve a problem other than "I am white, privileged, and want to ride on a fancy looking bus where I can buy a Vita Coco. I also want to pay as much as $6 per ride, which is egregiously more expensive than something that amounts to little more than public transit needs to be."<p>This whole thing is basically the epitome of the tech bubble and offers little to nothing of real value.