Making Microtransit Shorter, Smarter
Updated: Oct 3
Circuit CEO Alex Esposito connects travelers and community residents to local transit options with shared, on-demand, all-electric shuttle services.
Key Takeaways:
Small, shared EVs can fill big gaps in local transportation. Microtransit company Circuit focuses on short, first/last-mile trips, connecting people with transit, parking and local destinations rather than trying to replace traditional transit or ride-sharing.
Proving the Investment. The key to clean, sustainable microtransit for cities is demonstrating that their investments can move lots of local residents at a sensible and affordable cost per ride.
Better mobility comes from connecting systems, not solving everything with one service. Circuit's strategy is to complement buses, trains, private ride-hailing and other transportation options using data and AI to make those connections more useful and cost-effective.
Alex Esposito grew up in East Hampton, N.Y., a town on eastern Long Island notorious for beautiful beaches ... and horrendous beach parking. As a high school student, he and a classmate, James Mirras, toyed with the idea of running a low-cost shuttle service between the beaches and a local under-utilized parking lot, but the numbers didn’t make sense.
That’s where their idea almost ended ... but didn’t. One day, after graduating college and joining the white-collar workforce, they were revisiting the idea when they had an epiphany.
'What if we used neighborhood electric vehicles [NEV] to reduce congestion and emissions at the beach and cut out the fuel cost,'?" posited Esposito. "We could wrap the NEVS in ads and make it a free shuttle."
Turning an Idea Electric
Initially, the two friends turned their idea into a successful seasonal shuttle service for Long Island called The Free Ride. They kept their desk jobs, sold some ads, bought more cars, and even turned a profit.
But then a strange thing happened.
“A lot of cities started calling us to say they also had parking issues, and first/last mile transit issues and that they too wanted to go electric,” Esposito recalls. "That’s when we realized that our all-electric transit model was a powerful antidote for transportation, parking and mobility issues facing cities across the country.”
Making Microtransit Shorter, Sweeter
Today, as CEO and co-founder of Circuit, a microtransit company, Esposito is adding shorter, cleaner and more cost-effective options to the world of ride-sharing.
Circuit provides shared, on-demand, all-electric, app-based shuttle services to cities, special districts, properties and local communities seeking to offer low-cost or complimentary transportation options to clients and residents.
As of August, 2026, Circuit has provided more than 13 million rides to consumers in 40+ cities across eight U.S. states and Washington, DC.
As a turnkey service operator, Circuit supplies fleets of EVs, the operations, the drivers, a smartphone app that riders use to hail rides, and a data dashboard that allows cities to monitor in real time how and when the ride services are being used. The company also handles all vehicle maintenance, including daily charging.
In contrast to transportation network companies (TNC) such as Uber and Lyft, Circuit focuses on short trips, typically just a mile or less. Its municipal customers typically fund the program with local transportation funds, parking funds or grants, then use advertising and rider fares to offset those costs to the city. 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. And like any good entrepreneur, he wanted to build a business on his own terms, a mission to which he brought an obsession with efficiencies.
“I thrive on taking situations that basically make no sense, analyzing them, then rebuilding them with simpler, more cost-effective structures,” he shares. “This obsession with making things work better also drove me to the transportation industry, where there's certainly no shortage of opportunities to do things a bit differently.”
Getting Down to Business
After college at Bentley University near Boston—he completed his Bachelor of Science in economics and finance in 2009, followed by an MBA in economics and financial markets in 2010—Esposito took a job with Accenture as a business analyst. At that time, he was operating the Free Ride as a part-time business.
Esposito and Mirras formally co-founded The Free Ride in East Hampton in 2011. By 2014, however, their small company had garnered so much attention that they could no longer afford to treat it as a side hustle. They both quit their jobs and committed to growing the business full-time.
Connecting with Circuit
As part of their first round of capital raising in 2018, the co-founders participated in the Urban-X accelerator, a program designed to mentor and support early-stage startups focused on reducing emissions and creating more sustainable lifestyles for city dwellers. Through Urban-X, Esposito and Mirras decided in 2019 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 to help control demand.' It was hard to do those things with 'Free' in the company's name."
The co-founders settled on the name "Circuit”, he continues, because they wanted to create a shuttle service that would connect people to transit and local services, and connect them to the concept of all-electric transportation.
Restoring Connections
Today, Esposito and Circuit remain focused on a simple concept: improving the quality of life in cities.
“We’re using shared mobility to help cities reduce parking challenges, relieve congestion issues, and help people connect to existing, underutilized services that might be hard to get to,” he says. “If we can get someone out of their car to take a train or reduce demand for local parking, we think that’s a good thing."
Measuring What Matters
Since the Circuit co-founders rebranded their company, a lot has changed in the world of microtransit.
For one thing, notes Esposito, “a lot of the BS surrounding microtransit is going away” as cities have started focusing on providing services that are both cost-effective and useful to local citizens instead of just pursuing “shiny new” transportation options.
"We don't ever want to overpromise or under deliver."
-- Alex Esposito, Circuit CEO
“I think customers are getting smarter about asking the right questions (before launching a ride-sharing system),” he observes. “You know, ‘When should we do it?’ ‘Why should we do it?’ and ‘How much will it cost?’ are all part of that initial conversation.”
Top of mind for most customers is cost (to the city) per ride provided.
“Our customers typically want to invest in a service that’s easy to stand up, highly utilized by passengers, and cost effective,” explains Esposito. “That comes down to ‘Are we (the city) moving a lot of people with our investment?’ That’s why the cost per rider metric is so important to us and our customers.”
Adding Options
There’s also been a steady advance in the technology available to riders (to manage their rides) and to cities (to monitor the use of their ride sharing services.)
“Over the last two years, we’ve added a lot of features to our Circuit app, including a mobility wallet, fixed route tracking and the ability to offer discounted fares to seniors,” says Esposito. “We’re also now able to offer both fixed route or on-demand services in the same service package for municipal customers.”
And of course, artificial intelligence (AI) now permeates the world we live in. For its part, says Esposito, Circuit is using AI proactively in its ride routing algorithms, in its development cycles and to optimize its services. It also provides a powerful tool for managing driver schedules and the charging and maintenance schedules of the company’s vehicles.
“We’re using AI not only to manage day-to-day operations but also to build predictive tools that can model and simulate future events so we can become less reactive to what our data says happened last week,” he adds.
Meeting Demand with Flexibility
A recent example of a Circuit ride-sharing program offering flexibility and utility to its riders is Manhattan Beach, Calif.’s MB Wave Rider. It offers on-demand, all-electric rides anywhere within the city's four-square-mile downtown area, plus point-to-point rides to and from a local LA Metro Rail station.
The MB Wave Rider was started in June 2026 as a six-month pilot program with five vehicles operating seven days per week. It has been most popular among visitors to the city’s downtown restaurants, shops and entertainment venues.
Circuit is currently working with Manhattan Beach officials and local employers to determine how best to extend the MB Wave Rider to build on the pilot program’s success.
Right-Sizing the Ride
Another trend entering the world of microtransit is autonomous vehicles. In 2025, Circuit launched free autonomous vehicle (AV) pilot programs in West Palm Beach and Boca Raton, Fla. in collaboration with Guident, a Boca Raton-based AV technology company, and Auve Tech, an Estonian autonomous transportation company.
Unlike other driverless ride-sharing services such as Waymo, which offers remote guidance to its vehicles only on demand, Circuit’s AVs are monitored continuously by human operators at Guident who can intervene and control a vehicle if it encounters a confusing situation.
The important issue, notes Esposito, is not whether an electric ride-sharing vehicle has a driver or not, but whether it’s been right-sized to the use case, i.e., using smaller vehicles for smaller groups, and larger vehicles, say a shuttle bus, to carry larger groups.
“I resist the naïve thought that there's one solution that's going to fix every problem,” he declares. “The number of people and where they are going ultimately determines the best type of vehicle to deploy for a given use case.”
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 to either 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 interactions, advisor and customer calls and meetings with his management team occupy much of Esposito's time. All of which reminds 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 Strategic
With a decade and a half now on Circuit’s odometer, Esposito is focused more strategically on the future. Unlike the early years, when the company opened new markets in many geographic locations, he is more inclined these days to focus on regions the company already serves.
“Instead of pursuing a new opportunity in say, Oklahoma City, it might be smarter to open up ride sharing services in Hermosa Beach, Calif. just down the road from Manhattan Beach,” he suggests. “That allows us to leverage what we’ve learned about one community to an adjacent community with similar requirements. We don’t want to ever overpromise and under deliver.”
Another advantage to this regional expansion, he adds, is that he can use local resources (cars, drivers) in one city, such as Long Beach, Calif. to backfill temporary needs in other nearby cities (such as Manhattan Beach).
Knowing What Not to Solve
Ultimately, Esposito offers, his goal is to make Circuit a vital cog in the local transportation ecosystem, not to be end-all solution for every rider.
“What we’re really good at is providing on-demand or fixed route services in a relatively small zone,” he notes. “If our customers want to serve a large area, we might suggest subsidized fixed-route bus services or even subsidized Uber or Lyft ride hailing services. The real goal is for multiple public services to work together with multiple private partners to produce transportation infrastructure that’s valued by the community, and cost-effective to the local sponsoring agency.”
Connecting the Last Mile
But for all the progress that Circuit has made in addressing traffic and climate issues, Esposito offers, there is still much work to be done in microtransit. But it remains an environment rich in opportunity.
“Our focus on the last mile is still a very exciting and promising area of work,” he says. “Nobody likes traffic and I don’t think we need flying cars to mitigate traffic. If we can get people back on trains and buses, and use technology to make those connections easy, I think we can make a real dent in the persistent traffic congestion that snarls our cities today.”
If you enjoyed reading this story of transportation innovation, you'll also like my profile of Neill Etheridge, who is using electric hydrofoils to define a new brand of premium travel to connect cities with coastal getaways. If you’d like to work with me to highlight the great work your employees are doing reimagining and modernizing U.S. infrastructure, please contact me at brooks@personsofinfrastructure.com. Many thanks.
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