from “Bay Watched: How San Francisco’s new entrepreneurial culture is changing the country," by Nathan Heller

In June, I met with Kyle Kirchhoff, who had recently co-founded a transportation startup called Leap Transit. San Francisco’s public-transportation system, known as Muni, is a notorious mess, and Leap has tried to take some of the burden off: it launched a private shuttle, with a six-dollar fare (the Muni fare is two), to cover the same route as the overcrowded 30X Marina Express. Leap buses have leather seats and Wi-Fi. Riders use their phones to pay and track the vehicles’ progress.

Kirchhoff met me at Taste Tea, a gong fu-style teahouse in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley. (He is there so often that, when he walks in, the credit-card app Square registers his iPhone’s presence and logs into his account.) I asked him how he got interested in buses. “We thought, Well, why can’t we solve this problem that exists here, that’s sitting right in front of us?” he told me. He wore a gray T-shirt and jeans, and sat cross-legged on some cushions on the seat of a bay window. His father worked for three decades as a salesman and manager at Hewlett-Packard, and, growing up, he dreamed of a similar path. But when he finally made it to a big company he was disillusioned. What was missing, he thought, was imagination and a free spirit. Too much of American working culture was about the profit.

Take buses. “The ones that are made over in Europe, or Japan, they were just, like, awesome. They’re inspired.” American-made models, less so. “They didn’t start with ‘Hey, how can we make a really great bus?’ They started with ‘Hey, how can we make some money?’ That kind of mentality just really turned me off working on all of that.” A server came by with a tea tray and started making slow, soothing pouring motions from vessel to vessel. Flute music simpered in the background.

Leap, like Lyft, is an example of the helpful, Mr. Fix-It style of local techie culture. If a system isn’t working well, your neighborhood entrepreneur will build a better one. The approach has clear benefits for transportation, but it has risks, too. Say you’re a lawyer who rides the Muni bus. You hate it. It is overcrowded. It is always late. Fed up, you use your legal expertise to lobby an agency to get the route fixed. And the service gets better for all riders: the schoolkid, the homeless alcoholic, the elderly Chinese woman who speaks no English. None of them could have lobbied for a better bus on their own; your self-interested efforts have redounded to the collective benefit. Now the peeved lawyer can just take Leap. That is great for him. But it is less good for the elderly Chinese woman, who loses her civic advocate. Providing an escape valve for a system’s strongest users lessens the pressure for change.

Kirchhoff saw things differently. Part of the reason the Muni bus was bad, he said, was that there was no market competition to make it better. “I think choice is a wonderful thing, and I think that competition is a good thing, too,” he told me. “Not competition in the sense like ‘Hey, we’re trying to put you out of business’ but ‘Hey, we’re bringing something else to the table, and we’ve got some different ideas about how things work.’ ”

If the old activism focussed on public infrastructure, the new model takes privatization as its premise. 

Nathan Heller, from his article “Bay Watched: How San Francisco’s new entrepreneurial culture is changing the country,” The New Yorker, October 14, 2013.