A van-sharing pilot, built in weeks, to change the conversations the company could be in.
Bandwagon was a shared-mobility startup splitting taxi rides between riders heading the same way from New York's transportation hubs. The product worked. The strategic problem was who could buy us. The natural exits were ride-hail platforms and taxi vendors, and they all had their own pooling tech or were building it. We were a feature, not a company, from those buyers' point of view. Vans were the angle we picked to get into a different conversation.
What I want to write about is what we did next: a partnership with Transdev to launch a van-sharing pilot called Bandwagon Transit, built and deployed in weeks, designed to do something more specific than test whether van-sharing worked.
What the pilot was actually for
Chariot was building momentum as a commuter-van service, and the category was open enough that a credible van play could put a new kind of buyer at our table. The pilot was really about access to a conversation we hadn't been able to reach.
That changes what "ship" had to mean. We didn't need to optimize the route, refine the pricing, or scale the operation. We needed something real enough to generate press, conversations, and a credible claim that we operated in this space. Anything else was deferrable until one of those conversations turned into something.
How we shipped it fast
Transdev provided the drivers and the Mercedes Sprinter vans. That single decision saved us months: we weren't building a fleet, hiring drivers, or wrangling commercial insurance. We were a software and operations layer on top of someone else's infrastructure.
For the customer-facing layer, we repurposed almost everything Bandwagon already had. The on-the-ground sales staff working the airport queues moved to the new pilot. Existing signage and palm cards got light edits and a fresh visual treatment. We bought swag online.
That single call got us operating without months of permitting, and the donation data told us what riders actually valued the service at when they had the choice not to pay at all. For the route, we analyzed gaps in New York's transit network and picked Penn Station to Grand Central, a corridor where a meaningful number of trips weren't well-served by the existing transfer-heavy subway connection.
The whole stack (vans, drivers, brand, signage, route, regulatory posture) was assembled in weeks. It wasn't beautiful, but it was real, and the difference between "we have a deck about a van service" and "we have vans running between Penn and Grand Central, here's the press" was the entire point.
What the work was, and what the company was
The pilot did what it was built to do. The press landed. The conversations we'd built it to create happened. We sat at tables with partners we hadn't been able to reach before. Those conversations didn't ultimately convert into the deal that would have saved the company. Bandwagon didn't make it.
Conflating those (claiming the pilot failed because the company didn't survive, or claiming the company would have survived if the pilot had been better) would be dishonest in either direction. The deal that didn't close was a separate decision, made by another company, on factors that had little to do with whether van-sharing was a viable category. What I took from it was a muscle.
What travels
If the conversation you're hoping for isn't presenting itself, you can build something to create it. Not a deck or a memo, but something real, on the ground, that changes the facts the conversation is based on.
This is the muscle that gets least respected in formal planning environments, where the default is to study, model, propose, debate, approve, plan, and only then deploy. I wish more transit planning worked the way Bandwagon Transit was built. Too many decisions get made top-down and committed to permanently when the right move would be a six-week pilot that generates real ridership data, real operational learning, and real political room to maneuver. Building fast doesn't mean building badly. It means building enough to put yourself in a different conversation.