OurBus.

The name sounds homespun and folksy, like something the Partridge Family might have driven from gig to gig.

While the startup OurBus probably won’t ever transport musical families in its daily operations, it does have a grassroots purpose that is ruled by its customers, who use the mobile app-based service to give them more control over their destination and how they get there, writes Gary Puleo in The Times Herald.

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Those crowd-sourced riders have recently called the shots that resulted in the New York-based company expanding its bus service with daily express trips to New York City from King of Prussia (Park & Ride lot, 153 S. Gulph Road); Fort Washington (Summit Avenue cul-de-sac, next to SEPTA Station); West Chester (Chestnut Street and High Street) and Malvern (Matthews Road Park & Ride lot), filling a gap in the Philadelphia suburbs that targets “travelers in Montgomery and Chester Counties, who often have limited transportation options to New York City and surrounding areas,” according to OurBus founder Narinder Singh in a press release.

The expansion to the Western Philadelphia suburbs comes on the heels of the company’s expansion to upstate New York, Ithaca and Binghamton last fall.

“We started with crowd-sourced commuter routes in New Jersey in May 2016, and then we added longer distance inter-city trips in April of 2017,” explained co-founder Axel Hellman by phone. “We had a lot of requests in the beginning to do a Philadelphia to New York route, but there are companies who are already doing that, so it didn’t make sense for us to do it. But we have now followed up on the requests that were for suburban locations, like King of Prussia and Fort Washington, and then we figured out that we could go to Malvern and West Chester. We talked to the West Chester business district and there was a strong interest there, so that’s why we added those stops.”

Under the company’s unique business model, OurBus doesn’t own the buses, but partners with successful charter bus companies, lending its customer-centric technology in the process.

By downloading the free OurBus app from the Google Play store or iTunes store, customers can purchase tickets and track their bus in real-time, while sharing their ETA with others if they like.

To read the complete story click here.

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