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I used Chariot a bit a couple years ago. Sad to see it go. For people who haven't heard of it, it worked like this: I live in SF, and worked in Redwood City. Every day, there was some type of large van that would pick me up a couple blocks from where I lived and dropped me off a couple blocks from where I worked. So it was like a middle ground between public transportation and Uber / Lyft.
I used Chariot a bit a couple years ago. Sad to see it go. For people who haven't heard of it, it worked like this: I live in SF, and worked in Redwood City. Every day, there was some type of large van that would pick me up a couple blocks from where I lived and dropped me off a couple blocks from where I worked. So it was like a middle ground between public transportation and Uber / Lyft.
It sounds a bit like marshrutka[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshrutka
Earlier quoted context omitted.
SF public transit is pretty disfunctional and Chariot was trying to offer an alternative. - Timeliness - Busses and trains reliability are a joke compared to developed countries - Cleanliness - Due to an unmitigated homeless problem, the busses and trains operate as "day shelters" - Organization - There are dozens of different transit operators for what is one major metro region. Schedules are poorly synced, and even…
A lot of the history of transit-disrupting startups in the SF Bay Area can be attributed to how truly bad public transit in the SF Bay Area is. I understood Uber a lot more after trying to hail a taxi in SF. (Same with Boring Company and LA traffic.) A real disruptive solution for humanity - but a hard one to monetize - would be to figure out why cities with good public transit / shared transit infrastructure managed…
Ford owned, and Ford are making major cutbacks this week. https://www.businessinsider.com/ford-buys-chariot-65-million...
I'd not heard of Chariot before this. Was it widely used? It looked like Uber meets carpooling, or perhaps some sort of fancy work shuttle — and work shuttle companies open and close all the time, so I don't see what's newsworthy. They don't state why they're closing down, so I'm a bit puzzled on this one.
It's probably on the front page because Chariot was part of YC W15, and later acquired by Ford.
Pls stop trying to re-invent public transit.