by Mark McDermott
The Manhattan Beach City Council approved a six month trial of the microtransit operator Circuit, a public-private partnership that will allow residents and visitors to catch low-cost rides on electric vehicles throughout the city.
The service will deploy five electric vehicles — two neighborhood electric vehicles (NEVs), two sedans and one wheelchair-accessible van — across the entire city, with service extending to the Metro K Line’s Douglas Station in El Segundo. Riders will use an app to hail a ride, similar to Uber or Lyft, with fares significantly cheaper than commercial rideshare services.
“It’s from your home to where you want to go and back again,” City Traffic Engineer Erik Zandvliet said. “It doesn’t have a bus stop, although it can drop you off at a bus stop.”
The council voted 3-1, with one abstention, on Tuesday night to authorize the city manager to execute an agreement with Circuit Transit Inc. and appropriate up to $540,626 in Proposition A Local Return Funds for the pilot program. Council members Nina Tarnay, Amy Howorth and Mayor David Lesser voted in favor. Mayor Pro Tem Joe Franklin voted no. Council member Steve Charelian abstained.
The motion, proposed by Tarnay and seconded by Howorth, was a hybrid of two staff-recommended service alternatives. It called for a discounted fare for seniors, with a regular rate for other riders, and modified operating hours of roughly 11 a.m. or noon to 9 or 10 p.m., with some variation by day of the week. The motion also directed staff to explore city-provided EV charging to reduce costs, and to pursue corporate sponsorships and advertising revenue — though no alcohol advertising during the pilot period.
Tarnay framed the pilot as both a transportation investment and an economic one, noting the city’s congested summer streets and the coming influx of World Cup visitors.
“I see it as an investment in our businesses,” Tarnay said. “These people are going to spend dollars… We’re going to be able to take some of the cars off the street.”
Circuit Transit, a Fort Lauderdale-based company founded in 2011, operates similar services in more than 40 markets nationwide, including Long Beach, Santa Monica, Whittier, Huntington Beach and San Diego. The company claims more than 8 million rides to date across its network. It was formerly known as The Free Ride, a competitor to the Downtowner shuttle service that briefly operated in Manhattan Beach in 2017.
The Downtowner’s rise and fall loomed over Tuesday’s discussion. That service, a partnership between the city and the Downtown Business and Professionals Association (DBPA), ran from February to October 2017, using three six-person NEVs to shuttle riders around the western portion of the city for free. Ridership peaked at 3,000 per month in August 2017, but the operator couldn’t sustain its free-ride business model and asked the city for a large financial contribution. The city declined, and the service folded.
“It was not for lack of ridership that that didn’t work,” Howorth said. “It was their business plan, and that was on them.”
The key difference this time is that the city is the paying customer from the outset, with rider fares, advertising and other revenue sources intended to offset — but not fully cover — the cost. Staff recommended Alternative 2, a six-month pilot with five vehicles operating 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., seven days a week, at $5 per ride. At that fare level, the gross monthly cost of roughly $90,000 would be reduced to a net cost to the city of approximately $72,000 per month after projected fare revenue, according to staff estimates based on about 3,000 rides per month.
Zandvliet said the pilot was designed to gather data — on ridership levels, peak demand times, rider demographics, and the most popular pickup and dropoff locations — that would inform whether the service should continue, expand, or be modified after the initial six months.
“The idea is to get the pilot project in there first, and get the data out of that,” Zandvliet said.
The pilot is funded entirely from the city’s Proposition A Local Return account, a restricted fund generated by Los Angeles County sales tax revenue designated for local transit purposes. The city currently has approximately $1.1 million in the Prop A fund balance. Finance Director Libby Bretthauer said the reserve had grown in recent years as the city’s Dial-a-Ride program stabilized costs, but cautioned that the fund could not sustain a microtransit program on an ongoing basis without changes.
“We can fund the pilot program,” Bretthauer said. “But we just wanted to make it clear that we wouldn’t be able to fund this on an ongoing basis for years to come without making other changes to the Dial-a-Ride program or other programs.”
Bretthauer also emphasized that Proposition A funds carry a three-year statute of limitations — if the city doesn’t spend them in a timely manner, the funds must be returned to the county. Cities that lack robust transit programs sometimes exchange their Prop A allocations for general fund dollars at roughly 75 cents on the dollar, a swap Manhattan Beach has done in the past.
The relationship between the new microtransit service and the city’s existing Dial-a-Ride program was a recurring theme. Circuit’s proposed service, even at its most expensive alternative, would operate at a fraction of Dial-a-Ride’s per-ride cost.
Lesser said he had been skeptical of the proposal given the Downtowner’s failure, but was persuaded by the broader service area — the Downtowner never operated east of Sepulveda — and the potential to gather data on alternatives to the city’s increasingly costly Dial-a-Ride paratransit program.
“I was skeptical when this item came back,” Lesser said. “But the whole idea behind this is to facilitate transit to our downtown… This is viewed as something more inclusive.”
Howorth argued the council had a fiscal obligation to test a service model that could prove more efficient than the existing Dial-a-Ride program, which costs approximately $940,000 per year to serve roughly 6,500 riders — about $145 per ride.
“We have a fiduciary responsibility to try the pilot,” Howorth said. “This is the right thing to do at this time.”
Parks and Recreation Director Mark Leyman, whose department oversees Dial-a-Ride, said the pilot would help determine whether Circuit could supplement or eventually replace some paratransit functions more efficiently, particularly for medical rides, where the city already uses a supplemental Lyft service.
“It is inherently inefficient, paratransit,” Leyman said. “This gives us that opportunity to see if it could be more efficient.”
Circuit’s Daniel Kramer, the company’s vice president of program development, told the council the company hires local employees as drivers — not independent contractors like Uber and Lyft, but W-2 employees on Circuit’s payroll, which Kramer said allows for more thorough training, particularly for drivers operating the wheelchair-accessible vehicle. The company also provides real-time ride data to the city, and can customize its fare structure with promo codes, senior discounts, and employee vouchers.
“We aim to pool as many rides together as possible, do as much as we can with as little as possible,” Kramer said, describing how the company’s algorithm manages demand by grouping riders heading in the same direction.
Asked about success metrics in other cities, Kramer said the company’s most common challenge is having enough vehicles to meet demand, not attracting riders.
“I can’t think of one where it’s been discontinued because of poor ridership,” Kramer said. “If anything, it comes down to funding.”
Franklin was the lone dissenter. He questioned the value proposition, particularly for families. At $5 per seat, a family of four would pay $20 for a ride — a price he argued was comparable to or more expensive than Uber for an equivalent trip within the city.
“I’ve been tracking Uber since yesterday afternoon,” Franklin said, reporting that Uber fares for trips across Manhattan Beach ranged from roughly $6 to $10. “Is it going to be worth it? Are we an affluent community that can afford this? Absolutely. Is it going to give them anything other than what’s available now? I don’t know.”
Franklin also raised concerns about underage riders using the service without parental knowledge, the potential for Waymo’s autonomous ride service to make the investment obsolete, and the fact that the service would not operate late enough to serve as a safe-ride-home option after hours.
“I just see a lot of confusion on the part of residents,” Franklin said. “I see its limitations.”
Charelian, who abstained, raised concerns about the timing — the vote came just weeks before the city enters its annual budget process — and questioned whether the Prop A reserve might be better preserved as a financial tool, noting that the funds could be exchanged for general fund dollars if needed during a revenue downturn.
“If you all look at your dashboards that finance puts up, and you see our revenues are not trending well,” Charelian said. “There might come a time in the next month that we might need $330,000 in general fund monies, and you could have had this in your toolbox.”
Several members of the public spoke in support, including Downtown Business and Professionals Association Executive Director Kelly Stroman, who urged the council to approve the program quickly enough to have it operational before the FIFA World Cup this summer.
“Do it. Green light, turbo charge the EV, whatever it is, and get this rolling by June,” Stroman said. “It’s not going to do any good to get it rolling by August.”
Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Jill Lamkin noted that international visitors arriving for the World Cup would be accustomed to public transit and would naturally look for last-mile connections from the Metro line. She also noted that an alternative transportation option to downtown could reduce parking demand enough to satisfy Coastal Commission requirements for outdoor dining permits, a long-sought goal for the city’s restaurants.
“If we were to provide a service that would give residents another way to get downtown, that could potentially reduce the parking demand that the Coastal Commission would require of us, should we want to pursue outdoor dining,” Lamkin said.
The pilot is expected to take 60 to 90 days to launch after the agreement is finalized. If operational by early June, the service would be running in time for the World Cup matches at SoFi Stadium, which begins June 11.
Circuit’s service area would cover the entire city, with NEVs serving the commercial districts west of Sepulveda Boulevard and sedans and the accessible van serving the broader city. The council directed staff to return before the end of the contract term to discuss whether to extend, modify or end the service based on the pilot’s results. ER
