Joe
Colangelo

In 2016, Joe Colangelo did what any reasonable person with an underused driveway near the Cranford, NJ train station might do: he rented it out. Two dollars a day. His neighbor, a Manhattan commuter, got a guaranteed spot. Colangelo got beer money and a business idea. Within a year, he was running luxury buses to Midtown Manhattan. Within seven, he'd logged 600,000 reservations and turned a one-man driveway operation into New Jersey's most reliable private transit alternative.

The company is called Boxcar. The routes have names: the Raritan Rocket, the Morris Meteor, the Bergen Bullet. They run on time. The seats are reserved. There's Wi-Fi. There's a restroom. If the air conditioning breaks, you ride free. If the bus runs two minutes late, you get a text. These are not accidents of good fortune. They are deliberate decisions made by a former Navy officer who learned early that the difference between trustworthy and unreliable is showing up when you said you would.

Before the Buses

Colangelo grew up in New Jersey, prepped at Delbarton School in Morristown (Class of 2003), and studied political science at UC Berkeley. He was in his twenties when 9/11 happened - an event that, by his own account, shaped his decision to serve. He commissioned as a Naval Officer, deployed to Afghanistan, pursued Navy SEAL training, and worked on Middle East operations alongside Admiral William McCraven. He didn't finish SEAL training, but the ethos it instilled didn't require a graduation ceremony.

What followed was one of the more eclectic pre-startup resumes in New Jersey business history. He co-founded Golden Coast Mead in San Diego with fellow Navy veterans, and grew it into one of America's largest mead producers. He became National Sales Manager at TroopSwap - a veteran-focused tech company now known as ID.me. He consulted at Booz Allen Hamilton, running post-merger integration for commercial clients. And from 2013 to 2017, he served as President and Executive Director of Consumers' Research, America's oldest independent consumer advocacy organization, where he wrote about Uber, Bitcoin, blockchain, and net neutrality for outlets including Fox News and American Banker.

None of these jobs are wrong turns. They are, in retrospect, a masterclass in how to build a company that handles operations (Navy), scale (mead), tech policy (Consumers' Research), and market strategy (Booz Allen) - all of which you need when you're trying to run buses on time in New Jersey.

The Summer of Hell Pivot

The bus service wasn't the plan. The plan was parking. Boxcar's original model - which Colangelo described as "the Airbnb of parking" - was a marketplace for underutilized spaces near suburban train stations: church lots, VFW parking areas, funeral home driveways, private homeowners. Commuters booked them via app. Property owners pocketed 75% of the fee. Boxcar kept the rest. By 2017, the spreadsheet was generating around $2,000 a week.

Then Penn Station had its "Summer of Hell." Major infrastructure repairs redirected Midtown-bound trains to Hoboken. Thousands of commuters were stuck. Colangelo spotted the gap and launched a temporary bus service. It was so popular that riders "implored us to continue running buses into the fall season." The temporary became permanent. The parking marketplace became a foundation, not the business.

The routes that followed read like a geography quiz for trivia night in Bergen County: the South Mountain Express (South Orange, Maplewood, Short Hills), the Essex Express (Clifton, Upper Montclair, Verona), the Ridgeliner (Summit, New Providence), the Morris Meteor (Chatham, Madison, Convent Station), the Raritan Rocket (Cranford, Westfield, Fanwood). Each name is a small act of local brand-building. Each route is a lifeline for suburban professionals who'd rather have a reserved seat with Wi-Fi than a 7am wrestling match on NJ Transit.

The COVID Year That Almost Ended Everything

In March 2020, Boxcar's commuter business evaporated overnight. Colangelo did what he could: the company pivoted to drive-through grocery delivery, drive-in movie ticketing, mobile auto detailing, and - in a detail that deserves to go in a business school case study - Santa Claus home appointment bookings for the holiday season. In August 2020, he laid off his entire team.

He could have closed the company. Instead, he restarted the bus service in early 2021 at less than 10% occupancy and ran it at a loss. His reasoning: riders who stayed loyal during COVID deserved a company that stayed loyal in return. "In the absence of perfection" - his phrase for transparent, clear communication even when the news is hard - became a guiding principle. By 2024, the company was profitable. By 2025, it was handling strike-level demand.

The Strike Situation Room

When NJ Transit's rail strike loomed in May 2025, Colangelo did not issue a press release. He set up a "Strike Clock" website with a countdown timer, a real-time strike-odds tracker, and new route information. He filmed podcast-style "situation room" videos. He doubled Bergen Bullet capacity, added 1,500 extra seats for Fridays, 2,000 extra for Mondays, and launched emergency routes for Maplewood and South Orange. He told anyone who would listen: "Every minute that we get closer to the strike... we are adding more service."

Bloomberg covered it. News12 covered it. NJ commuters booked. Boxcar scaled from its normal 2,000 daily riders toward a potential 6,000. In the same month, Colangelo launched The Ivy Line (West Windsor/Princeton area) to serve commuters shut out of rail service, and opened service in Metuchen for the first time. June brought The Shoreliner - summer buses from Manhattan to the Jersey Shore, the kind of route that only makes sense if you're thinking about commuting as a lifestyle, not a grudging daily duty.

The DeCamp Moment

In April 2023, DeCamp Bus Lines - a 153-year-old institution in New Jersey commuting - shut down. Colangelo moved. Within weeks, Boxcar absorbed several of DeCamp's routes, stepped into Bergen County with the Bergen Bullet, and welcomed thousands of displaced riders. Expanding to Bergen County had been a goal since 2018. The opportunity arrived faster and sadder than expected, but Boxcar was ready.

That moment illustrated something important about what Colangelo has built: a company that is structurally positioned to be the answer when public and legacy transit fails. He charters from 14 different bus companies, giving Boxcar a flexible capacity model that NJ Transit's fixed infrastructure can't match. "We know where our next 100 buses will come from," he has said. That's the kind of operational confidence that only comes from having done the unsexy logistics work before the emergency arrives.

Beyond the Bus

Colangelo's stated ambition is to build Boxcar into the "super app for the suburbs" - a membership-based platform he has described as "American Express for the suburbs." The parking marketplace already operates 1,500+ spaces across four states. The service layer includes auto detailing, grill cleaning, knife sharpening, dry cleaning, and through Boxcar Office Club, flexible co-working space for suburban remote workers.

The thesis is cohesion: if you wake up in New Jersey and need to get to Manhattan, park your car, detail it while you're gone, and drop into a co-working space before you catch the bus home - Boxcar wants a role in all of it. Whether that vision scales to match the ambition is an open question. But Colangelo has proven repeatedly that he can build and rebuild. The COVID pivot. The DeCamp absorption. The strike response. These aren't lucky breaks. They're a pattern.

He lives in Cranford with his wife Sarah (a Navy veteran and attorney) and their five children. He is Vice President of the Delbarton Alumni Association and visits campus to talk to students about entrepreneurship. His Twitter bio reads: "Founder and CEO @boxcartransit. Father of five. Work hard, Be nice." Fourteen words. Not a word wasted.