SAN FRANCISCO—In a city replete with not only local buses, and the famously-hated tech company buses that shuttle hundreds of workers daily 40 miles south, a new startup is set to debut a private luxury commuter bus line, charging $6 for a roughly three-mile ride.

At its Wednesday launch, Leap will only operate four buses (with one more in reserve) during commuting hours, focusing on giving rides from the Marina neighborhood in the city’s north, going southeast to downtown in the morning, and the reverse in the evening. There’s no fixed schedule—the buses are just constantly rolling at 10 to 15 minute intervals, and passengers can check the iOS or Web apps to see when they will arrive. (Ars first profiled Leap in March 2014.)

Leap is betting that riders are willing to pay nearly three times what a ride on a local Muni bus costs, and a fair bit less than what a taxi (or its newer cousins, Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar) would charge for a similar journey. What makes it worth that price? Free Wi-Fi, comfortable seats (limited to just 27, no standing passengers), USB ports, plus food and drinks.

By comparison, the same ride on a San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (Muni) bus costs just $2.25. Muni also doesn’t require downloading an app (or printing a paper ticket at home), distribution of information and schedules in multiple languages, and it's required to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. But Muni doesn’t have an on-board manager who will bring you iced coffee, either. For now, Leap is hardly a threat to Muni, which serves 702,000 passengers a day. At full capacity, Leap will only serve a few hundred people.

"We just don't want to get in the way of other operations, our goal is to make the city work better overall," Kyle Kirchhoff, the company’s CEO, told Ars at a Starbucks on Chestnut Street in the Marina neighborhood on Tuesday morning. "We have tried to design an experience that takes the hassle out of commuting, and part of that is not having a crowded space."

Kirchhoff isn’t the only one willing to take a chance on his own company: major Silicon Valley venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz have already invested $2.5 million. (By comparison, Muni’s annual budget is $851 million.)

"Leap is providing a technological solution to an age-old problem: the commute," Billy Draper, of Draper Associates, an investor in Leap, told Ars by e-mail.

"The beauty isn't just in the buses themselves, but in the app," Draper continued. "Reducing the amount of unnecessary stoppage, being able to track exactly how much time is left before you arrive at your stop, adding social components to interact with other passengers and coordinate with friends, and then eventually planning dynamic routes based on user demand and concentration rather than 'because that's the way it's always been'—those are the things we're excited about."

Meanwhile, Gabriel Metcalf, the CEO of SPUR, an urban policy organization in San Francisco, told Ars that Leap represents another point on the spectrum urban transit.

"The public sector has to raise its game and offer faster trip times—that's part of the implication," he said. "I think it's the real opportunity is to out-compete the private automobile and that's where we should all be focused. So far the public transit options have only captured a small part of the market."

As cozy as your living room, but on a bus?

Previously, Leap had drawn some ire from local public officials for using the city’s public bus stops as pickup locations—those spots have now moved to white zones , which are specifically for loading and unloading.

Records with the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), the state agency that regulates transportation, show that Leap has a pending application to operate as a Passenger Stage Corporation (PSC). According to Kirchhoff, such a license "is really about allowing us to operate outside of San Francisco" and doesn’t impact its immediate operations. He expects the application to be approved later this month.

Terrie Prosper, a CPUC spokeswoman, told Ars that "it is not legal for the company to operate without a license," but declined to elaborate as to what sanctionary measures, if any, the agency would take if Leap launches as planned.

In May 2013, when Leap was testing out its service by essentially mirroring the 30X Muni line from the Marina to downtown, Supervisor John Avalos was not impressed. He called the entire company’s business model a "crock of shit" in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle.

In a Tuesday phone interview with Ars, Avalos said he hadn’t heard from the company in two years. After Ars explained what the buses were like, he still wasn’t impressed.

"It's just someone with money and with an idea to fit into the boutique niche market and make money off of wealthy people who want to live above it all and don't want to use the other services that are available for people in San Francisco," he said.

But the chief executive, while acknowledging that the company is out to make money, argued that the $6 price tag can be reduced to around $4 after incorporating pre-tax commuter discounts through WageWorks and Commuter Benefits.

Kirchhoff also happily embraced the Silicon Valley jargon of not just providing a product or service, but rather, "an experience."

"We have tried to design an experience that takes the hassle out of commuting, and part of that is not having a crowded space," he said. "San Francisco faces some very real challenges in terms of getting people to work. It's impossible to hail a cab these days, car services are busy. We've set out an eye to serving all of San Francisco. We're just generally looking at where the current transit infrastructure is overcrowded. Mass transit doesn't always make sense everywhere. We're trying to build an experience that encourages more people to use mass transit and not get in their own cars. We definitely didn't build it for one group of people."

"The experience of it all is an important thing," he continued. "You look back at cafés in Europe as these cultural centers, we thought about building a bus as a blend between a coffee shop and a living room, we wanted to build a space where people feel comfortable, we want to figure out how to bring community back to cities."

Not your parents' commuter bus

Kirchhoff explained to Ars that Tuesday was the company’s last full training day—buses were out on the road but weren’t taking regular passengers beyond company staff and invited guests (such as yours truly). He whipped out his iPhone and sure enough, a bus was just a few minutes away.

The bus was hard to miss: it’s painted bright blue and it looks very much like any regular city bus. Kirchhoff explained that they’re renovated NABI buses that were sold off by other municipal transit agencies. While they look like regular natural gas-powered city buses, these were gutted and the interiors were completely redesigned to incorporate non-traditional features, such as several USB ports for phone charging.

Once I'd created an account on the app—which took a minute after linking it to my Facebook account and credit card (and that included three free rides)—I checked in on the app. That generated a QR code which I held up to a mounted iPad once I'd boarded. (There's also an auto-checking feature using Bluetooth beacons, which Kirchhoff took advantage of.) Once on board, I ordered a coconut water direct from the app.

Behind the driver’s seat, there’s four distinct sections: the manager’s station and fridge, which sits adjacent to a long wooden counter with tractor-seat stools facing directly outside. Opposite the counter are more traditional forward-facing seats. After the few steps in the rear of the bus are almost lounge-style leather-style seats, underneath wood panels.

"In the front of it we designed it more for introverts and there's the forward facing seating that you can read a book," Kirchhoff added. "We thought about the back area, the shape of the seats is in a curve. We want the design to inform the behavior."

Sitting along the wooden counter felt more like being on a train than a bus—it sure was comfortable, but it was hard to imagine actually doing real work (in our case, writing) while stopping, starting, and going up and down the hills of San Francisco.

But then, Kirchhoff admitted to Ars his superpower: "I don’t get carsick."