Teenager Keeps Bainbridge Tourism Shuttle Alive in Memory of Founder Jack Niehaus

By Audrey Nelson

This story previously appeared in The Kitsap Sun

As we celebrate Labor Day and summer rolls on, weekend visitors walking from the Bainbridge Island ferry terminal into Downtown Winslow are continuing to take advantage of a tempting alternative: the Jack Flash Shuttle.

Local high schoolers drive Jack Flash’s open-air golf carts, which run consistently from mid-morning into the evenings, Friday through Sunday. Depending on staffing, the cart may also operate during busy or sunny weekday afternoons.

Interested passengers can flag down a cart anywhere in Downtown Winslow or hop onboard at a variety of sponsoring locations including Island Cool Ice Cream, Bainbridge Homes Real Estate, and Proper Fish. The rides are free, although passengers are encouraged to tip their driver.

Terra Wright Knudsen, a realtor at Bainbridge Homes and one of Jack Flash’s sponsors, said Jack Flash has made “the island more accessible to people and more convenient…It’s just one more way to help people see how special Bainbridge is.”

Although Jack Flash itself is just two-plus months old, the downtown shuttle concept has a notable history on Bainbridge. In 2017, Jack Niehaus, then a student at Bainbridge High School, came up with the idea of a downtown shuttle, inspired by tourist shuttles he saw in Santa Monica, CA., while on vacation with his family.

Nicole Niehaus, Jack’s mother and the owner of Sweet Deal Clothing on Winslow Way, agreed to buy a cart and partner with him on the project. But she was busy with her business, she recalled, and from the start, the downtown shuttle was very much Jack’s responsibility.

“He was a little bit of an entrepreneur,” Nicole said. “I was very fly by the seat of my pants. ‘Let’s just do it.’ But he was a planner. He drew up a business plan for it.”

Jack piloted his shuttle, which he called the Sweet Deal Mobile, on and off from 2017 until the Pandemic. Even after he went away to college at Cal Poly, he spent his summer vacations picking up passengers from the ferry terminal and sharing tidbits of island history.

“Instead of just being the driver and taking people to town, he really wanted to give them an experience,” Nicole said.

She recalled times Jack would leave the Niehauses’ house for a Sweet Deal Mobile shift: “When I would tell him, ‘Catch the ferry, you gotta go catch the ferries that are coming in,’ I was just like, ‘Hop in and go’…[But] he would always have to have his shower and look really presentable, get dressed all nice. He really took it seriously.”

Eventually, when the COVID-19 Pandemic hit full force, and Nicole Niehaus let the Sweet Deal Mobile lapse entirely. Then, about a year ago, the Niehauses’ family friend, Hart Williams, developed an interest in the downtown shuttle concept. Williams, who runs a small investment advisory firm, was mentoring a high school junior named Nick Wirz.

“I’d talked to [Williams] before about what I wanted to do after high school and college, and that’s sort of business-oriented, sort of entrepreneurial,” said Wirz, now a rising senior at BHS. “We were talking about opportunities for what’s almost like an internship, a trial.”

“I was like, well, I don’t really want to have you work at [my firm],” Williams recalled. “It would be really boring work for a high schooler. And [Wirz is] super entrepreneurial. And I was like, ‘Why don’t we start something?’” A downtown shuttle, already tried and tested, seemed like the perfect choice for a startup.

The Niehauses gave the shuttle their blessing, and Williams and Wirz began to study PowerPoint decks and swap ideas.

“We had a bunch of dumb names lined up, like ‘The Winslow Wagon,’ and a couple other ones,” Williams said. Then this spring, Williams received devastating news: young Jack Niehaus had been killed in a motorbike accident in Thailand. He was just 25 years old, and his death left those around him shocked and grieving.

“I was like, you know what, we gotta shift our focus here and make it so that his legacy lives on the island,” Williams said. He and Werz pivoted immediately. The Winslow Wagon went out the window, and Jack Flash was born.

“I love the fact that they’ve chosen to name it in [Jack’s] honor, which is a great honor, and we’re thankful for that,” Nicole Niehaus said.

Now Hart Williams and his wife, Nicole Williams, run Jack Flash alongside Wirz and four other high school drivers. Hart said he and Nicole take a hands-off approach, letting Wirz manage most of Jack Flash’s logistics, including drivers’ schedules.

In the long run, Williams hopes Jack Flash can attract more downtown sponsors — “they’re the ones who make it tick” — and work up to running four carts at a time. But otherwise, his goals are modest. “Our plan has always been just to keep this thing alive,” he said. “Even if it’s wildly successful, I don’t envision Nicole [Williams] and I making money doing Jack Flash. It’s more something that we want to do, and it’s important to the community, and we want to see it down there.”

He added, “We’ve still got a lot to learn.”