Introducing Light Transit: Ride Electric, Ride Light
I love getting people out of cars and onto sustainable transportation. Active transportation is the key to healthier, more connected cities. When streets are safe, walkable, and bikeable, people actually use them. Good infrastructure and a few simple amenities are all it takes to make multi-modal transit the easy choice — and when that happens, local business corridors come alive, greenhouse gas emissions drop, and daily life gets more accessible for everyone.
But getting there is hard. Let’s look at the real problems, and some great solutions already at our disposal—if we’re willing to allow them.
An empty docking station in Western Massachusetts after a bikeshare provider’s bankruptcy left proprietary docking stations that could not be re-purposed by a new vendor. Read the full story for more on the risks of proprietary infrastructure here.
The problem with how bike share gets built today
New infrastructure is expensive. So is the feasibility study a city has to fund just to find out whether it can support a bike share network in the first place. From there, cities wade into a long, painful procurement process — and at the end of it, they're often locked into a single vendor for five years or more.
The e-bike boom of the last few years brought real innovation — new vehicle types, new business models, all heavily subsidized by venture capital. But the lesson arrived just as fast: you cannot profit off public transit without some form of subsidy.
That leaves cities at a crossroads. Either they take on a slow, expensive public build — or they hand the risk (and the control) to private operators like Bird, Veo, Lime, or Spin. Meanwhile, the industry on both sides, public and private, has consolidated down to a handful of players in North America.
A transit hub in Berlin, Germany, showing the wide range of transit options available.
We're stuck. Europe isn't.
European micromobility keeps evolving because operators and private companies there constantly wrestle with the real question: build or buy? Do you spend heavily to develop proprietary technology in-house, or buy proven tech, lean on vendor support, and accept slightly lower margins to move faster?
Private operators make that trade-off every day. Public bike share vendors stayed in their lane and kept iterating. And over time, procurement agencies got smarter — piecing together custom systems that actually fit their cities, instead of settling for a single vendor's one-size-fits-most solution.
In North America, demand is just as strong. But the industry is fragmented, and most U.S. vendors still insist on owning and managing every piece of the stack themselves. Cities and riders are the ones who pay for that — in cost, in delay, and in rigid systems that don't fit their streets.
Why Light Transit exists
Seeing these barriers up close — not from the outside, but from years of doing the procurement, the operations, and the on-the-ground work myself — convinced me it was time to build something different.
Light Transit exists to reduce friction. Instead of reinventing the wheel or locking cities into a single proprietary stack, we integrate with best-in-class partners across hardware, software, and operations to build systems that actually fit the communities they serve. We're bootstrapped and built to stay that way — lean and selective by design, so we can move fast and stay focused on what actually gets people riding, not on satisfying outside investors.
We want to shift how people think about mobility altogether. We envision a world with real transit choice: cruising to the beach in a light four-wheel vehicle, riding a cargo bike with your kid to school, or grabbing a shared e-bike for a quick errand downtown.
Right now, that means focusing on micromobility first: we're integrating with industry-leading partners to build a world-class electric bike share system, grounded in the same hands-on approach we've used to build and operate systems like the one in Long Beach.
Get in Touch
If you’re a local government or organization looking to expand micromobility in your community, please get in touch!
I’m always up for sharing needs and resources so that we can work together towards lighter transit as a society.
