Circuit CEO Alex Esposito connects travelers and community residents to local transit options with shared, on-demand, all-electric shuttle services.
Growing up in East Hampton, N.Y., on eastern Long Island (LI), Alex Esposito observed that Hamptons beach parking during the summer months was always challenging, even for locals. During high school, he and one of his classmates, James Mirras, thought briefly about creating a low-cost microtransit service between the beaches and an underutilized parking lot in town. But they abandoned the idea as too risky—"what if it rained all summer?"—and too expensive to turn a profit.
But the idea continued to simmer in the entrepreneurs' minds, even as they completed college and joined the white-collar workforce.
"And then one day we thought, 'What if we used neighborhood electric vehicles [NEVs] to reduce congestion and emissions at the beach and cut out the fuel cost,'?" recalls Esposito. "We can wrap the NEVs in ads and make it a free shuttle."
Discovering a Need
For the next few years, Esposito and Mirras ran their microtransit services—initially, they called it the Hamptons Free Ride, then simply The Free Ride when they expanded to other LI cities—as a seasonal business.
"We kept our desk jobs, sold some ads, bought more cars, even turned a profit," offers Esposito. "The beach-goers were happy. And the brands were happy because they were interacting with consumers in a meaningful and positive way."
But word of their success was getting out.
"Suddenly, a lot of cities were calling us saying they had parking issues and first/last mile transit issues and that they wanted to go electric," Esposito continued. "We realized that our microtransit service was not just an ad-supported beach shuttle, but rather an electric mobility solution that can solve transportation problems in cities around the country."
Making Shorter Sweeter
Today, as CEO and co-founder of Circuit, a microtransit company, Esposito is adding cleaner, more cost-effective options to the world of ridesharing.
Circuit provides shared, on-demand, all-electric, app-based shuttle services to hotels and communities seeking to provide low-cost or complimentary transportation to travelers and local residents.
In contrast to ride-sharing companies—think Uber and Lyft—Circuit focuses on short trips, typically a mile or less. Its revenue model relies heavily on advertising and service contracts with cities, special districts and transit agencies, not lengthy car rides. And all Circuit drivers are W-2 company employees, which provides, in Esposito's opinion, a "quality of service that's a step above typical ridesharing services."
"We think of ourselves as a connector or feeder system to existing transit lines," he explains. "Our goal is to be complementary, not competitive with those systems."
Catching the Entrepreneurial Bug
Esposito grew up in a family where entrepreneurship was standard operating procedure. Both his father and his grandfather were involved in residential real estate in the Hamptons, and his mom—his parents divorced when he was quite young—was very supportive of his natural curiosity and opportunistic outlook. Esposito's father and stepmother also co-owned several businesses.
"I've always had a bug for entrepreneurship," he declares. "But I also knew I wanted (my business) to be something I built on my own, not something I just fell into."
Rooted in Esposito's drive to chart his own path was an obsession with efficiencies, i.e., a desire to take a current situation "that makes no sense," analyze it, then rebuild it with a simpler, more cost-efficient structure, an approach he would later apply to co-designing subsidized shuttle services.
"I think it was my curiosity and obsession with making things work better that drove me to the transportation industry where there's no shortage of opportunities to do things more efficiently," he observes.
Getting Down to Business
When it was time for college, Esposito followed his instincts.
"I was always interested in economics and business and initially applied to a few liberal arts schools," he offers. "But then I realized that if I want to study economics at a liberal arts school, why not just go to a business school with a liberal arts curriculum?"
Bentley University, near Boston, offered Esposito an ideal combination: a solid business school, a "great campus" close to a large city, and a location not too far from home. He completed his Bachelor of Science in economics and finance in 2009, followed in 2010 by an MBA in economics and financial markets from Bentley's McCallum Graduate School of Business.
Committing to Reality
Initially, Esposito took a job with Accenture as a business analyst. In 2011, he and Mirras officially founded The Free Ride in East Hampton as a seasonal microtransit business. By 2014, however, their business model had garnered so much interest that the co-founders decided to quit their day jobs and commit to growing The Free Ride as a full-time venture.
"We were getting inquiries from across California, Australia, even Europe about connections to transit and how best to reduce demand for parking," Esposito recalls. "We realized that we needed to raise some capital to grow into some of these opportunities and expand our team to handle the growing list of inbound requests."
Connecting with Circuit
Following a round of capital raising in 2019, the co-founders participated in the Urban-X accelerator, a program (currently unavailable) founded by MINI to mentor and support early-stage startups focused on reducing emissions and creating more sustainable lifestyles for city dwellers. Through that engagement, they decided to rebrand their company "Circuit."
"We realized that the name 'The Free Ride' just wasn't memorable," Esposito explains. "We also learned that 'Free' can cause emails to go to spam pretty easily, and we had some customers saying, 'We like the service, but we'd like (to have the option) to charge $1 per ride to help control demand.' It was hard to do those things with 'Free' in the company's name."
Esposito and Mirras settled on the name "Circuit," he continues, because they wanted to focus on being a connector shuttle that could connect people, connect them to transit and local services, and connect them to the concept of all-electric transportation.
Serving Microtransit Use Cases
Today, Circuit—the company has about 600 employees—operates microtransit services in more than 40 cities across eight states including California, New York, Florida, Texas, New Jersey and Washington. The company offers customers the option to use 4-to-6-passenger NEVs, sedans, or 12-to-16-passenger shuttles.
"Our fleets vary in size from a single vehicle to cities operating more than 20 cars," says Esposito. "Our average fleet is about eight vehicles operating in a zone typically two to six square miles."
Some cities, such as West Palm Beach, Fla., he notes, use all three types of vehicles to address various microtransit use cases and demand levels.
Putting Safety First
Circuit monitors its fleet operations through a series of computer-based management dashboards.
"We can open up our screens remotely and locate every one of our vehicles in real time," Esposito says. "For safety, every vehicle has a video camera so we can see what's happening inside the vehicle if an emergency occurs."
Not Your Father's Ridesharing
Circuit riders will note minor—and sometimes significant—differences with conventional app-based ridesharing services.
For one thing, explains Esposito, the starting point and ending points of every Circuit ride must be within the same geofenced area, which can range from one to 10 square miles. Once a passenger requests a ride, the system will look for and connect him or her to the nearest driver. The rider will receive a wait time and may be pooled with other riders heading in the same direction.
"The big difference," he emphasizes, "is that there's a good chance you might know your driver if you're a regular Circuit rider. Our employee drivers are such a big part of the business. They give our services much more of a community feel than typical ridesharing services."
Riding the Dream
Most days for Esposito begin in West Palm Beach where he shares a condominium with his wife and a rescue Chihuahua-Dachsund-Pug mix named ChaCha. His morning routine includes coffee and a scan of the main news headlines. Then it's off either to Circuit's Florida headquarters in Fort Lauderdale or its local office in West Palm Beach.
"A nice thing about being in Florida is that I get to use our service for my commute," Esposito observes. "I'll take a Circuit to the Brightline train and then take the Brightline train to our office in Fort Lauderdale. I get to practice what I preach, which is a nice way to start the day."
For Esposito, there's no such thing as a typical day. Whether he's in Florida, New York—he's still a New Yorker at heart and travels there frequently—or on the road visiting Circuit field offices, he usually spends two or three days in the office, a day attending offsite meetings, and another day working remotely.
Investor calls, capital-raising efforts and meetings with his management team put steady demands on Esposito's time. All of which remind him how much owning a business has changed his life.
"I love what I do," he reflects. "But it goes very quickly from being an idea to being your life."
Keeping It Simple
As Esposito drives Circuit forward, he remains focused on keeping things simple.
"When reading advice on how to grow a business, it's easy to say, 'We're different than that,' or 'That example won't work here,'" he observes. "The key is to say, 'How do we simplify our business so that it is more like (the advice being offered)?' We should always try to learn from what's worked previously."
Making a Difference
Esposito is also mindful of the scale of the problems that challenge him, his co-founder and his team at Circuit every day.
"We have a huge traffic issue and a huge climate issue on our hands, and transportation—of which passenger vehicles are a major component—is the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S.," he notes. "We also know that about one-third of all vehicle trips in the U.S. are under three miles."
To that end, Circuit is helping reduce emissions and the use of single-occupancy vehicles for short trips in cities.
"We're not only reducing traffic congestion and air pollution, we're also creating jobs, enhancing business activity and improving public health," Esposito emphasizes. "Transportation is one of the best investments a city or a business property can make."
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If you enjoyed this article, please check out my profile on Lion Electric’s Nate Baguio who is using fleets of modern, zero-emission school buses to restore student transportation infrastructure to good health. If you'd like to recommend other experts in infrastructure for me to feature on this blog, please send your ideas to me at brooks@personsofinfrastructure.com Many thanks.
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