A Patch Chat With Josh Crandall—Mr. Clever Commute

If you live in Montclair and commute to New York City, you’re probably familiar with Clever Commute. It’s a free email service for commuters to make them aware of transit delays. Clever Commute is approaching 15,000 subscribers, most in the New York Metro area. But Clever Commute also functions in Boston and Chicago, and is in various stages of deployment in Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Portland, Oregon. And it’s not just for the trains as the service also tracks buses, ferries, and light rail with the PATH.

Jaime Bedrin of Montclair Patch spoke with Montclair resident Josh Crandall—a.k.a Mr. Clever Commute himself—to find out how this service got started. (Comments have been edited for clarity and length.)

So, how did it all get started?

Josh: It was January of '06. I was at the Watchung Avenue Station on the morning after a bad commute home from the city. And I had a BlackBerry, and the other folks who had BlackBerries were all staring into them. And I just had the 'eureka' moment where I said, "How come these people didn't help me last night when we found out that Penn Station was a mob scene?" It dawned on me that the technology gives everyone the ability to be connected, but we weren't connected to each other. So I reached out to the people that I knew—five or six folks from my line who I know from around town and said, "Why don't we share email addresses, and we can just give each other a heads up in case we see anything?" And I wrapped a little technology around it and made it easy to use.

Jaime: How does the service work?

Josh: All of the content comes from the commuters. So, if a person riding the Montclair Line has some information to share, they take out their smartphone, send an email to the one address that they need, and it comes through my technology. I clean out some stuff, add some stuff to it, and in real time, send it along to the fellow commuters. Sometimes there's an opportunity, if I'm at my computer, to share information again. If somebody's in Penn Station, and they say, "Penn Station has been shut down due to whatever, a fire," that information doesn't necessarily automatically get shared with people on other lines. So I'll whip that around through real time back to everybody else.

Jaime: Okay.

Josh: That's how the core offering works. But there is something else that I started about a couple of years ago. I don't know if you've ever done the Penn Station commute where you have to wait for your track number to be announced.

Jaime: Yes.

Josh: Let's say you're walking towards Penn Station. As soon as New Jersey Transit publishes that (track) information, you have it on your smartphone. So when you're coming down the escalator, you can see what track your train is on and head right for it, instead of making that awkward stop at the monitor, and then, sprinting to your track.

Jaime: Did you have a technology background?

Josh: Yeah. I spent many years working in technology. And at the time, I was working in technology at Morgan Stanley.

I had no intention of starting a business, that's for sure. I did not wake up one day, and say, "Why don't I connect all the commuters?" I just said, "Why don't I do something to make life a little bit easier?" So I didn't even think about if there was a business model, or what that model would be, until 2008, when two things happened. One of them was that I was connected with CBS Radio, and we struck a deal where they would license the content from Clever Commute. The other thing that happened was that I started figuring out how I could put advertisements on the alert messages.

Jaime: I’ve seen your ads for The Pie Store. Do you use mostly local ads?

Josh: There are three kinds of ads. There are local ads, up and down, for example, the Montclair Line. There are regional ads. My current example is Carnegie Hall. They want to reach everybody in the New Jersey Transit, Metro North, and Long Island Railroad, so you'll see those as well. And then, there's a third that I've just started working with. And those are the so-called affiliates. Groupon, for example. I just started doing business with Groupon, and their Deal of the Day is going to come through on Clever Commute as well.

Jaime: What’s the future for Clever Commute?

Josh: There's absolutely a lot of room to grow in the markets where I am established, like New York. And then, there's also a lot of room to grow into other markets where we're not fully deployed yet. I've got such a mountain to climb in the New York area. Under different circumstances, there's no reason why this model won't work in every major city globally, anywhere there is a mass transit scenario.

To sign up to Clever Commute, go to www.clevercommute.com.