Inspiration
This is a critical time for the transportation industry and our cities. As ride sharing apps like Uber and Lyft vie to disrupt the taxi industry in cities around the US, few solutions seek to work with those fleets and make better use of existing infrastructure, while creating more access to transportation for citizens. This becomes increasingly crucial in the midst of growing concerns about urban and economic development, congestion, and the environmental impacts of our cities.
What it does
Bandwagon is solving last mile and intermodal problems for passenger transportation and travel networks. Right now, Bandwagon solves three concrete problems:
- Transportation hubs, convention centers, & large event venues face increased congestion due to limited transportation, a lack of physical space, and disorganized e-hail pickups.
- Local taxi providers continue to lose business as they struggle to compete with well-funded e-hail companies.
- Passengers must choose between less efficient, unsophisticated taxis and often expensive, less knowledgeable TNC services.
Bandwagon is the solution to each of these problems: we work with airports, convention centers, large events, and taxi operators to make taxi pickup more effective and affordable, and to reduce emissions by matching passengers going the same way.
Rather than adding more cars to the road, Bandwagon seeks to make better use of what we've got. Bandwagon is a fun, social, software platform that reduces congestion and emissions by making it easy for people to move together at select airports and events, enabling passengers in taxi lines to share rides.
-Passengers simply text Bandwagon their destination to get started. -Bandwagon finds matches based on their destination. -The taxi fare is split between the two passengers--saving them money. -Bandwagon then collects a match fee. -The entire process happens through SMS, without application download or smartphone required.
How I built it
I built Bandwagon with the help of a great team, by collaborating with the Taxi and Limousine commission, major companies like Creative Mobile Technologies and Verifone, and major authorities like the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
We’ve had a lot of success really listening to passenger, driver, and municipal pain points, and building practical solutions that work for all of our constituents — it’s important to us that passengers, transportation hubs, and drivers all participate in a solution that benefits everyone.
Challenges I ran into
The major challenges we ran into were how to incentivize passengers to share and adopt a behavior they weren’t used to — and also, how to reach the critical density of passengers needed to reliably create passenger matches.
We solved the passenger incentivization challenge by looking to models that already work — models which already effectively support sharing behavior amoung passengers: HOV lanes. We saw that HOV lanes successfully encouraged passengers to share by giving those passengers an express trip, and now we create a similar incentive structure for Bandwagon customers.
It’s very hard to create the critical densities needed to reliably create shared rides among passengers. To solve this problem, we built a solution that focuses solely on transportation hubs where critical densities of passengers already exist for consolidation and realization of greater efficiencies.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Bandwagon has already surpassed numerous milestones affirming its benefit to members of the value chain and potential to revolutionize transportation. These milestones include:
-Funding from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority. -700,000 Verizon Powerful Answers Award in Sustainability. -Successful operation at Boston Convention Center. -Contracts with Jour de la Terre in Montreal -Successful operation at National Association of Broadcasters Convention in Las Vegas, with over 100,000 attendees. -Successful operation at International CES, with over 150,000 attendees. -Closure of Bandwagon’s PANYNJ Contract and successful operation at LaGuardia Terminal B -Operation at International Terminal at John F Kennedy Airport -Strategic partnership with Creative Mobile Technologies payment integration -Strategic partnership with Verifone allowing payment integration -Investment and expansion support from Transdev North America
What I learned
Over the course of implementing Bandwagon, I’ve learned how essential it is to focus on specific customer pain points and simple, implementable solutions to those pain points. Focus focus focus! There is almost infinite ability to improve on the simplest of innovations — and really thought-through and well defined solutions delight customers and improve lives!
What's next for Bandwagon
-Newark Airport Launch -MAGIC Fashion convention launch, with over 100,000 attendees. -Match.com partnership -Penn Station launch -Expansion to Washington D.C. -Expansion to Denver International Airport -In-city taxisharing in conjunction Verifone and Creative Mobile Technologies -Expansion to Cambridge Massachusetts
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