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Today, coronavirus has shaken up public transportation — fares have been eliminated, people are being asked to avoid it, ridership is down. And some places have put limits on bus occupancy to maintain social distancing — so maybe two buses will be needed instead of one, which is still better than 33 cars. But the…

The first quarter of 2020 has been truly transformational, as COVID-19 brought immense change in a matter of weeks. Employees of Optibus, the startup I co-founded, have been working from home for weeks now; trade shows have been canceled, and the industry we serve — mass transportation — is reeling from ridership declines and service…

The principles of smart rostering can help with the service reductions and driver shortages that are among the implications of the pandemic.

Different cities, regions, and countries were hit by the COVID-19 outbreak at varying times and instituted changes to their transportation systems at different points and in different ways. Now that parts of the world are considering the next stage of managing the pandemic — how to gradually reverse lockdown and revive the economy while attempting…

One of the first changes brought on by COVID-19 was a huge drop in public transportation ridership and regulatory demands that service be reduced. Agencies scrambled to make these service changes, rushing in days through a planning and scheduling process that typically takes weeks and quite a lot of scheduling know-how. According to our estimates,…

These days, browsing through any transit agency site will tell you one basic truth: everything is changing quickly. Two weeks ago, agencies began posting notices about increased sanitation measures, and a week later there was a deluge of announcements: service changes, more service changes, backdoor boarding, no fares, and more. And when this is over (and I believe coronavirus will be over), these same service changes will need to be reversed gradually, creating more flux.

Public transit has been severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic in cities around the world. While the impact has been extensive – ridership has declined as much as 90% for some services — the radically altered position of public transit goes beyond economics; it actually turns some of our core beliefs about transit on their heads.

Mobility as a Service, better known as MaaS, for all its four-words-made-into-one, is actually not one service or one application. Full blown MaaS will be made of several distinct and separate moving parts and in its wake, the technology driving today’s transportation providers will morph into something entirely different. But before we go there, let’s discuss what MaaS is.

Movement in and between cities is being reduced around the world in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving public transit agencies to figure out how best to provide transit service while minimizing the spread of the virus and contending with expected drops in ridership and driver availability.

For travelers, it is unnecessarily complicated to move around cities. Every urban area uses specific systems, applications, and customer interfaces. An overarching mobility platform, including urban mobility and travel products, is a feasible solution. It is also a chance for innovative mobility providers to catch intercity travelers as new customers. We interviewed three startups that…