Optibus

Euro Bus Expo is back at the NEC in Birmingham this November, and Optibus will be there. From November 3-5, find our team at Stand 148 for a look at how AI-powered planning, scheduling, rostering, and real-time operations are helping UK operators run smoother, more reliable services.

Lindsay Smalley-Ward and Diana Meisenburg will be at the stand, alongside Ivan Schejtman, ready to talk through whatever challenge is on your mind this year, from driver retention to punctuality to electrification planning.

📅 November 3-5
📍 NEC Birmingham, Stand 148

Book time with the team here 👇
https://optibus.com/wp-content/uploads/conference/euro-bus-expo-2026.html

We recently visited our customers at Niagara Transit, and it was a day well spent. Thank you to Adam Arbour, Tim Shannon and the whole team for hosting us.

We enjoyed spending time with the people behind the service, learning how they run their operations day to day, and seeing their buses up close.

Visits like this are one of the best parts of our work. Seeing how a transit team plans, runs and adapts its service on the ground helps us understand what matters most to them. It keeps us focused on building tools that make their work easier and their service better for riders.

We're proud to partner with Niagara Transit and look forward to what's next together.

🚀 Optibus is launching the Real-Time Suite - and you can catch it live at APTA TRANSform & Expo in Chicago, October 4-7!

For many agencies, the systems running their day-to-day operations were inherited rather than chosen, which has meant living with ETAs that are often wrong, dispatchers who find out about problems after riders already have, and compliance reports that get pieced together by hand every month.

The Real-Time Suite works with the live data that agencies already produce and turns it into something usable: ETAs published in under 10 seconds, live fleet monitoring, automatic detour detection, passenger alerts from one place, and reporting that builds itself as operations run. Agencies don't need to add a new system or a new vendor relationship to get there.

📅 We'll be talking through all of this at APTA TRANSform & Expo from October 4-7. Come find us at Booth #3567 and join the launch event at our stand on October 5 at 3:30 p.m. CT.

Read about the Real-Time Suite: https://blog.optibus.com/real-time-suite-to-improve-cad-avl

Book a meeting with us at APTA: https://calendly.com/optibus_/meet-optibus-apta-1

We're partnering with Carahsoft to make it easier for public sector agencies across North America to adopt Optibus's AI-powered platform for transportation planning and operations.

For transit agencies, that means a faster path to:
🚌 End-to-end scheduling and workforce allocation optimization
📡 Real-time operations management
📊 Cloud-native, data-driven workflows
⚡ 100% electric bus fleets

"This collaboration solves a real challenge: getting proven, AI-powered solutions through procurement quicker and into daily use," said Sharad Agarwal, Managing Director at Optibus.

Read the full announcement: https://blog.optibus.com/carahsoft-partnership-public-sector

A short list of the tasks standing between transportation planners and the work that actually improves service:

Assigning drivers, flagging issues before they become problems, tracking audits, optimizing schedules, allocating resources, staying compliant, and adjusting routes in real time…it all adds up.

An AI agent built specifically for public transportation can handle these tasks directly, giving planners back the time to focus on the bigger picture.

See what Optibus Agent can do: https://optibus.com/product/agent/?utm_source=LinkedIn&utm_medium=social+media&utm_campaign=Optibus+Agent+page

Software downtime costs the average business $5,600 per minute, according to Gartner. For a transit agency, that number compounds quickly: missed service penalties, a control room working blind, and schedulers staying late once systems come back online.

Older, on-premises systems carry more of this risk. Sophos reports that 76% of ransomware attacks target on-premises servers, since they take longer to secure and repair once something goes wrong. Teams running true cloud-native infrastructure, by comparison, deploy new code 46 times more often than legacy setups, according to Puppet's State of DevOps report, catching problems before they become outages.

Our latest eBook, Reliable Transit Service, looks at why the architecture behind your transit software determines whether an outage is a minor interruption or a costly, cascading failure.

Download it here: https://optibus.com/ebook/reliable-transit-service/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=social+media&utm_campaign=reliable+transit+ebook

Optibus' 2026 State of Bus Driver Retention in Public Transport report found that supervisors can take 10 to 20 minutes to learn that a driver is handling an incident on their own. In that time, 66% of drivers say the communication they get from dispatch feels poor or neutral, and 70% say reaching dispatch when they need it most is a struggle in the first place.

These numbers point to a gap between what's happening on the road and what control centers can see in the moment. When that gap closes, drivers get support faster and controllers can act on incidents while they're still small.

The report goes deeper into what drivers said about the support they get and what would actually help.

Read it here: https://optibus.com/ebook/2026-industry-report/?utm_source=LinkedIn&utm_medium=social+media&utm_campaign=Driver+retention

Today we're launching Allocation Optimization, an AI-powered engine that automatically matches available drivers to open duties, accounting for their preferences, seniority, and the regulatory and union rules that apply.

For most operations teams, allocation still means matching the right driver to every duty by hand, then reworking it the moment someone calls in sick. Allocation Optimization takes that on both ways: building full plans ahead of time, and re-allocating on the fly when the day of operation changes.

That turns days of planning into minutes, lowers standby driver costs, and frees planners for the decisions that actually need human judgment.

Read more: https://blog.optibus.com/new-intelligent-driver-and-vehicle-allocation