Our Roots (Corporate History)
In the early 1970's, America experienced its first oil crisis. And for the first time in history, we began to think about getting to work - without an abundant supply of cheap gasoline at our disposal. In response, a number of major employers, including the Chrysler Corporation, developed vanpool programs to exploit the advantages of sharing the cost of commuting.
Based on the early success of these employer programs, the Urban Mass Transportation Administration (known today as the Federal Transit Administration) created several pilot vanpool programs across the country to see if the concept could be expanded to serve portions of metropolitan areas that were not well served by conventional public transportation. The founders of Chrysler's program developed a proposal based on its' successful corporate model, and were selected by UMTA to develop and document their pioneering efforts in the Twin Cities vanpool demonstration program in Minnesota. Chrysler formed a new subsidiary corporation, VanPool Services, Incorporated (later changed to VPSI,) to join with the Metropolitan Transit Commission and Public Service Options in this historic undertaking. As a testament to the success of that early team's effort, VPSI still manages a thriving fleet of vanpools in Minnesota some three decades later!
Success of the Twin Cities experiment led to a rapid expansion of our program across the country. We were selected by the California Department of Transportation to manage the first statewide vanpool program in the country. Next, the Michigan Department of Transportation hired us to manage their State employee vanpool program, which, over time and through much nurturing, developed into the State-wide MichiVan program. And the list goes on.
We've been moving the world since those early days in the Twin Cities. Today, over thirty years later, we serve more than 5,000 vanpool groups from 40 offices nationally and in Europe. Nobody else comes close. VPSI stands alone as a pioneer and world leader in developing and maintaining world-class vanpool programs and standards. After all…we wrote the book.
