A new business is helping close a longstanding gap in Leelanau County: getting around without a car.
Leelanau Transportation, founded by husband-and-wife co-owners Jim and Kim Robb, launched Leelanau Transportation this spring to offer prearranged rides across the county, an area where rideshare services like Uber and Lyft have never reliably operated.
The idea grew out of Kim Robb’s years working in the wedding industry.
“From 2013 to 2018, I managed about 100 weddings in Leelanau County,” she said. “And every single weekend, there were transportation issues.”
Guests expected to be able to call an Uber and couldn’t, while having nothing to offer for a substitution.
“I knew there was a need for sure,” Robb said.
After stepping away from wedding planning, Robb said she kept running into the same problem from a different angle: visitors who already owned cottages in the area but didn’t want to rent a car just to get there or leaving.
“They just want a ride to their cottage so they can be there and have their own car,” she said.
Robb began laying the groundwork last August, securing commercial insurance and the required licensing, and ran a roughly three-month test period before deciding to move forward.
The business officially launched in April. Since then, calls and emails have come in daily.
“We’ve been able to accept almost everything, but it’s just crazy,” she said.
The company currently runs two vehicles and plans to expand to as many as four amid growing demand.
She described the service as distinct from a typical rideshare app.
“We’re really not Uber drivers — we’re more prearranged drivers,” she said.
Safety and reliability are the priority for Leelanau transportation.
Demand has come from several directions.
“Wedding and bachelor or bachelorette parties looking for safe rides home, part-time residents who fly in and out of the area regularly for work, and visitors who simply don’t want to ask friends or hosts for a ride,” Robb said. “We’ve had so many people call that are here for this and that ... or they just simply want to be safe and have a ride to wherever they’re going and a ride back.”
Robb said the company has been focusing on building rela- tionships with several area lodges.
“They want to be able to have an answer for their guests,” she said. “Until now they’ve had no answer, and now they just say, call them.”
Pricing reflects the realities of staffing overnight and earlymorning airport runs. Standard rides between Leelanau County and Cherry Capital Airport in Traverse City run about $100 during normal hours, roughly 7:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. Rides booked outside that window — to catch early-morning flights, for example — can run roughly $200, reflecting the toll on drivers.
Robb said word of mouth and a single advertisement in the Leelanau Enterprise have already paid off. “We put out an ad in the Enterprise in April,” she said. The ad led to a regular customer who flies weekly between the area and Washington, D.C., and Cincinnati for work. “He booked us for every week, the whole year,” Robb said.
