DETROIT – It’s well known that metropolitan Detroit has what is probably the nation’s worst public transportation problem.
Apart from the bad roads, it is the only major urban area where there is no public transit from the airport to the downtown. The city has a poor bus system poorly coordinated with the suburban one.
There are two boutique light rail systems, neither of which is very practical for getting people to work or school. Three years ago, voters narrowly turned thumbs down on a regional transit plan.
But there is hope, and he is called Andy.
Meet Andy Didorosi, a bright 32-year-old entrepreneur who, under the radar, has established a vision and the beginnings of a transportation network for Detroit.
It’s called the Detroit Bus Company, and it gives kids rides to school, gets people without transportation where they need to go, conducts both private and public tours, and is making money, growing bigger, and helping solve an urgent need.
“I believe in the bus,” said Andy, who has been interested in transportation issues since he opened his own shop and started doing car repairs when he was 16. He had a series of jobs.
Then, one day in 2011, he bought a used bus at an auction. He formed the bus company and started giving kids free rides to school. Detroit public schools were bankrupt and too poor to have a transportation network. That first year, they gave 5,711 rides.
Andy then decided to buy another bus, and another. Soon he realized the local ones were often badly rusted, thanks to Michigan’s harsh winters. So he bought them online from warmer climates.
Now, he is up to 15 buses, and is looking at three more for sale outside Amarillo, Texas. “My accountant hates that I don’t ever remember when I bought them or what I bought them for.”
He told me this while laughing over a plate of Mexican food in heavily Hispanic Southwest Detroit. That wasn’t far from where he lives in a loft apartment over this bus terminal, with Zimba, an 11-year-old street dog rescued by a friend of his from West Africa.
But if he is socially responsible, he is also a businessman. The good works he does are financed by a series of popular public and private tours his Detroit Bus Company (thedetroitbus.com) runs.
The most popular, Drunks of Antiquity, takes patrons on a pub crawl through the four oldest bars in Detroit. Another, a two-hour tour of Detroit, also does well, as does Ghost Light, a tour of Detroit theaters. He also does an increasing business servicing family reunions, which are especially popular among African-Americans.
Even the for-profit business has a socially responsible spinoff, however; for every patron who buys a seat, the Bus Company gives a free ride to a school child via a non-profit spin0ff, Ride for Ride.
“I believe in the bus,” Didorosi said. “The idea that self-driving care are going to take care of all our transportation needs is just ridiculous.” (For the record, he actually something considerably stronger than ridiculous.)
“People who think buses will just go away and be replaced by self-driving cars have never been to the developing world,” he said, adding, “shared transit is the best way to meet people, get an affordable ride, decrease traffic congestion, and decrease our impact on the environment. “
For the record, he does have a private vehicle – an ancient 2003 Chevy Silverado he bought from the Norfolk and Southern railroad.
“Rusted through and 250,000 miles,” he notes.
These aren’t his only ventures; Didorosi has founded or is in the process of starting nine businesses, including Hyper, a service that will take anyone in Detroit, Hamtramck and Highland Park to their destinations “without long waits, transfers, or confusing schedules.” There’s also POOL, designed to renovate homes.
So far, he has made money, done well and never had a business failure. Not bad for a kid who was born in near-poverty, never had a business course, and dropped out of an engineering college after less than two years because he was itching to join the real world.
Andy does credit the general manager he recruited for the bus company, Theresa Leslie-Robinson, with helping steady him and knowing when to say “Yes, but…”
Leslie-Robinson also gives him a different generational perspective; he is a millennial, she a boomer from his mother’s generation, who had a wealth of managerial experience working for the Motown Museum and the Girl Scouts of America.
“What you see in him is an individual who has chartered his course and moved ahead without taking advantage of others.” She left a safe job to join him “because everyone sees the need – few people have the courage to step out and be part of the change. Andy does.”
He didn’t have a lot of help early on. Until he was eight, he lived in one room with his parents and two brothers.
His father left soon after, and his mother, a clerk at Kmart, somehow put herself through college and law school, and today has her own commercial litigation firm.
What does his future hold? Andy thinks his base will always be Detroit, (“the greatest home base in the world) but hopes someday to have an international business in transit technology. By the way, he notes that 85 percent of his 38 employees are black, and not intentionally. “I am happy to say I just hire for skill and quality of applicant, and this is what I got,” said Didorosi, who happens to be white. He snorts when employers claim they can’t find qualified African-Americans. He does think “Detroit is the greatest opportunity in the world.” He just may be helping make it so.
