We think we do a pretty good at NYCSBUS. But we always want to do better. Any ideas about how we can:

• Provide better feedback to bus drivers and support them to find more satisfaction in their jobs, to be safer and to provide better service

• Use our GPS and maintenance data to predict vehicle breakdowns

• Look at our safety and performance data to make our drivers even safer

• Improve our learning system so that our capacity to predict bus arrival times improves daily

• Develop systems to respond to, even anticipate, concerns of parent and schools

• Dynamically understand planned, cyclical and episodic traffic challenges to and alert vehicles to these challenges to promote on-time service while not compromising safety

• Turn our vehicle repair shops into low-, or even zero- waste operations

• Develop an employee health program and find ways to enrich our colleagues’ lives

• Open and use our six depots as resources for their communities and our city

And maybe there are things we need and we don’t even know what they are. So reach out, please.

To use a transportation metaphor, collaboration is a two way street. We are happy to share data and assets to make transportation, busing and our city better. Some things we have

• 800 buses traveling 40,000 miles per day on regular routes across NYC. They are tracked by GPS that monitors driving behavior, mechanical performance is tied to maintenance records

• A small but growing electric bus fleet and planned vehicle-to-grid and vehicle-to-building experiments

• 2000 employees whose health and performance we monitor

• Six acres of physical space across New York City

• A lot of scrap metal, oil and parts

• Subject matter experts in transportation, logistics, vehicle maintenance and electric vehicles.

Have a way to make the world better? Any of this useful? We want to help.

We are always developing technology to make busing better and would be happy to work with others. Right now this is what we’ve got, let us know if you’d like to use it, to contribute to making it work even better:

• NNS: The NYCSBUS Notification System, a fast, low cost system built using Uber’s Hexagonal Hierarchical Spatial Index to look at vehicles on route and predict arrival time and alert users via text message.

• Incident Management: With Amazon we are building a large, general purpose incident management system for school busing.

• NYS Bus Inspection Scans: Like other states, NY inspects buses and issues inspection certificates. These come by email, we have a system to scan those records as they arrive and write them to a database.

We like to work with others but sometimes that’s a challenge.

• It’s not wrong to say we are obsessed with and even paranoid about student safety and confidentiality. This not only limits what we do on buses and ways we will experiment, but it makes it very hard for us to share even route data.

• We’re also pretty frugal and focused. We like to do new things, we love it when we do new things that are low- or no-cost. One advantage… we’re a nonprofit and we are very open to collaborating on grant writing.

• We’d like to see a return on collaborations, ideally for the students and schools we serve and at least for our community or for the school bus industry in general.