SuperShuttle To Give Its Last Ride This Month

LOS ANGELES, CA — SuperShuttle, the van service that has been shuttling Angelenos to and from Los Angeles International Airport for decades, will shut down its operations at airports across the county by year's end.

SuperShuttle was founded in 983 to serve LAX and quickly grew so popular that it spread across the country and to Latin America, Canada, Europe and Asia. But competition from Uber and Lyft crippled the company. In recent weeks it has pulled out of airports serving many cities, including Burbank, Sacramento, Phoenix, Baltimore and Minneapolis, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The Times obtained a letter from the company to a Los Angeles-area franchisee, vowing to honor bookings through through the end of the holiday season. "SuperShuttle plans to honor all reservations and walk-up requests for service" through Dec. 31, the letter said.

SuperShuttle executives could not be reached for official comment. But two SuperShuttle reservations agents reached by telephone confirmed that the company was going out of business, as did a company executive who was not authorized to speak publicly.

Though the SuperShuttle has lost favor with travelers, its shutdown will be felt in Los Angeles, where the shuttle is one of the few services that can still pick up riders curbside at LAX after the airport's recent changes to help ease congestion. Since November taxis and ridesharing services have been diverted to a pickup lot next to Terminal 1 that travelers either walk to or are ferried to by an airport shuttle.

The decline of the SuperShuttle came on fast and hard with the advent of ridesharing companies. At LAX, shared van rides plunged by two- thirds in the first half of this year compared with the first half of 2016, the first full year that Uber and Lyft operated there, according to city data cited by The Times. Trips on LAX's FlyAway buses also sank by two-thirds during that time; taxi trips fell 39%; and courtesy shuttles to car rental facilities, parking lots and hotels saw a 20% decline. The number of Uber and Lyft trips, meanwhile, more than doubled.

The letter to the franchisee cited "a variety of factors" for the company's closure, "including increasing costs and changes in the competitive and regulatory landscape" that "have called into question the economic and operational viability of the company's operations."

The shutdown will leave franchisees in the lurch -- hundreds of them in California alone.

Signs of the company's shakiness appeared shortly before the Thanksgiving holidays, when SuperShuttle suspended its operations at LAX because of an issue with insurance. The California Public Utilities Commission said the service was out of compliance with state regulations. The issue was resolved Nov. 21.

SuperShuttle is owned by an affiliate of Blackstreet Capital Holdings, a private investment firm in Bethesda, Maryland, court documents show. Blackstreet describes itself as specializing in acquiring small or midsize companies ``that are in out-of-favor industries or are undergoing some form of transition.*

Blackstreet acquired SuperShuttle in September from Transdev on Demand Inc., which is part of the Transdev Group of France, according to a lawsuit Transdev filed against Blackstreet this month in Delaware Chancery Court in a dispute over some terms of the transaction.

City News Service and Patch Staffer Paige Austin contributed to this report.