AI-Powered Planning and Scheduling can help to address drivers shortage | Amos Haggiag (#025)
Chapters:
- Amos bio [02:54]
- Optibus story [05:23]
- Importance of planning and scheduling in Public Transit [13:07]
- How to tackle the driver shortage problem? [24:01]
- Artificial intelligence and data analytics in planning and scheduling [32:14]
- How to manage change management in public transit agencies? [36:30]
- Fixed line services Vs. On-demand buses [41:42]
- Key challenges faced by public transit agencies around the globe [49:05]
- Optibus: Future plan and expansion [54:51]
- Key lessons for entrepreneurs building B2B and B2G Startup [59:37]
- How to raise funding? [[01:03:54]
Complete Transcript:
The most efficient way of taking people is with mass transit. I would even say that the bus system in Tel Aviv is not even efficient enough, even though the buses are full of people, like you need metro system, you need light system to move millions of people in high frequency. It doesn’t make sense to put, hundreds or thousands or millions of small vehicles that will take two people here or two people there from your door to door. The problem is that you can that it sounds good. Like when you tell someone, Hey, I have an app. You book a vehicle, it takes you from home to work, and it’ll arrive in a few minutes. It sounds so much better than going to a bus stop. Wait for 10 minutes, go on the bus with many people maybe standing the entire trip taking a stop. That is far away from my work. I prefer to take a door-to-door trip. So it’s true. It’s better, but it also costs much.
Welcome to the Mobility Innovators Podcast.
Hello everyone.
Welcome to another episode of Mobility Innovators Podcast. I’m your host, Jaspal Singh. Mobility Innovator Podcast invites key innovators in the transportation and logistics sector to share their experience and future forecast. In this episode, we’ll be discussing the role of planning and in public transport and building a unicorn in B2G segment.
Our today’s guest is an amazing entrepreneur. He is currently CEO of Optibus, one the fastest growing mobility startup with operation in more than 25 countries and has 12 offices around the world. He started his career with Siemens in the USA but came back to Israel and worked with Collarity and Microsoft. He started Optibus with one client in 2014 and now working in 2,000 cities across the globe.
He is the recipient of several prestigious math and technology awards, including the Intel Prize for software engineering, the Elkin Prize for information technology and the Wolf Prize for mathematics.
I am so happy to welcome Amos Haggiag, Co-founder and CEO, Optibus. It’s now time to listen and learn.
Hello Amos. I’m really excited to have you on the show and looking forward to learning from your experience.
Hi Jaspal, great to be here.
Great. so today I’ll be spending time getting to know more about you, about your entrepreneurial journey because you are one of the unique co-founders in a public transit sector and your thoughts on innovation in public transport sector.
But to start with, I would like you to share some interesting fact about your career that are not on LinkedIn because your LinkedIn profile is quite rich, but I want something you are still hiding from the world.
Yeah, my LinkedIn profile definitely has all my work experience. What it doesn’t have is that during all of this, during the time that I work in all these places, I basically worked at Optibus in my spare time. So what you don’t see there is that since 2004-2005, something like that, until 2014 where we actually started Optibus and that you see on LinkedIn during all these 10 years. I worked at Optibus. It wasn’t called Optibus back then if you didn’t have a name. But I worked on the algorithms, I worked on the product. I had so many meetings with transit operators, agencies, learning about their challenges. At some point they even use the product. We get feedback from them, like doing all of that in my days off weekends, nights, together with my co-founder – Eitan Yanovsky. So yeah, that’s definitely something you won’t see. I think.
But that’s amazing. It means the Optibus not only started in 2014, it’s actually started in 2004,
It’s actually started 2004-2005 and yeah, it’s was like a sidekick
And you have built a strong foundation and that’s what startup required the passion to continue. So you solve that problem for 10 years, it means you are really passionate about that problem. And you want to solve it. And that’s how we see the result now, how Optibus is growing, and building up.
So, you mentioned about your careers. So you did your Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Mathematics, and then you started to career with Siemens. Later you work with Microsoft as a senior software development engineer. And in 2014, you actually jump from the Microsoft, and you started with Optibus.
And I can imagine it must not be a easy decision because leaving Microsoft when you are at the high of your career, it was not an easy choice. But we can see, you know, Optibus is a first unicorn, which is working in a public transit sector, which not many people understand clearly. It’s really a big achievement. I really feel inspired seeing your success.
So I’m curious to know, how did you come with this idea? Because you said you started in 2004. What did push you to move into this direction and what actually motivated you to work in this sector for so long? I mean, if you’re working for 2004, it’s like now 20 years, around 20 years.
Yeah. So I started Optibus, or we started working on Optibus. It wasn’t called Optibus. It wasn’t even a company, but I started. So as you said, I start, I learned Math and Computer Science. I was first year at university. I met Eitan who became a co-founder. We were both students studying the same degree. That’s how it started. My father told me at some point during the first year at university, so he was the CFO of one of the largest public transit companies in Israel. And he was telling me about the task of planning and optimizing and running a public transit system. And what he explained back then is that how manual it is and how inefficient it is. According to what he thought and coming from the financial side for him, he was looking at how much it costs to one public transit system.
So a small public transit agency sometimes is like tens of millions, hundreds of millions here of like total operational cost. If you look at driver’s, vehicles, everything. And when you look at a very large agencies, let’s say like TfL or something like that. Then it’s in the billions or tens of billions. Right. so it was, today Optibus is very different focus, but at that point, like it was telling me, I think it’s, we are taking something that is so big and impactful and very expensive to one, and we are designing it with very low tech tools like pen and paper Excel files, people, like, based on their experience and stuff like that. So it was, say, telling to me, Hey, you’re like naively, I guess you are studying math and computer science.
Maybe you can solve that problem. He thought it’s probably an easy problem that any student can solve. Very quickly, I understood that it’s a very complicated problem to solve. And I didn’t have any idea how to even start you know, solving it. But what we did have is that we had access to data. We had transportation operators in Israel that are dying to solve this problem. Just take our data, do whatever you can do with it, give us any solution that that is better than what we have. So we have this corporation, and within time, it took time many, many years that we working on algorithms and then working on a product, working on the design, and on the, a lot on the math side and the performance and the cloud-based part of the system.
Amos Haggiag [00:08:14]:
And at some point, I’m continuing with my career. Like, I went to the US to Princeton. I did some work in medical imaging, completely different field. And then I worked at Microsoft. And at Microsoft, I spend a lot of time working on personal assistant what became Cortana which is like Siri and Alexa, stuff like that. So basically during all of that time we are building Optibus and working with all these transit operators. Until we got to a point that was, we had a good enough solution. Now when I’m looking at it, it looks like, I don’t know, how can anyone work with that, with what we had back then? Because it was doing something very basic. But it was much better than doing it manually. So it gave them value, and that’s how it started.
Amos Haggiag [00:09:13]:
But 2014, like fast forward to that. I think what was the trigger points that, that got us to do the job, we understood that it can be something much bigger. Because initially we thought that we are solving a problem of a few transit agencies but then we understood that it’s a global issue. We had the biggest transportation operators first in Israel later on the world, wanting to use this technology. So we thought, hey, if we build something that will solve this problem completely end to end, then it can really make an impact on the entire world. And that’s something big. So we had to make the jump of moving for me personally, moving from Microsoft to co-founder role from another company, but for both of us, it was really hard because we were in a very good place.
Amos Haggiag [00:10:10]:
We were in the peak of our career and working on really interesting technology and stuff. And then coming to work, like on day one when we moved to, I moved from Microsoft to Optibus. We work in the basement of my house, just two of us with no money. We had no investment in the beginning. So it’s a lot of risk as well and we didn’t even have money to rent an office. So it took time. We raised money. We grew the company, and then very quickly we grew very Quickly
That’s amazing. And I think the best part is that your first client was a CFO of a company. So your father, so as a CFO, that’s the hardest person to convince in a business to buy something. So if you can convince a CFO, the whole company will agree.
Actually, funny enough, even though we work with the, the company where my father was a CFO, it wasn’t our first customer. Because my father was, because he was my father, he didn’t want to use his relationship with me to influence decision making. So because of that, he was actually doing the opposite. Like he wanted to avoid any, like interaction and financial. So actually we had several customers before we got to convince that company to use us.
Amazing. I think that’s a a good part. You know, the push you hard to grow outside and then come back and, and you know, so amazing.
Thanks for sharing that, Amos. It’s really interesting to learn how this entrepreneurial journey start. And like you mentioned, it’s not an easy choice going from a Microsoft suddenly to a basement, no money, no brand. And when people ask you what you do, so it’s hard to tell them. So now you mentioned, you know, when we think about public transit, people just need think about, like, I tell people I work in public transit, so they think about buses, train drivers, workshops and all kind of stuff, but nobody think about the backend system like planning and scheduling, which is very important. But not many people understand that how this whole planning and scheduling work.
Jaspal Singh [00:12:23]:
But planning and scheduling not only help to optimize operation, but can also improve help to improve the accessibility, safety in the night. You can provide better buses where it’s need. You can help rider satisfaction to get the bus when it needed. Like I mentioned in Tel Aviv, I got the bus midnight right on time. So, so planning is continuous help you. So can you share how the role of planning and side function is changing now? Like you are working in this space now, 18 years, how this thing is changing. And I would love to know some success case studies, because you are working with so many clients. So how you see some of those success case study emerge, which actually motivated you to do more, and build more into this area?
Yeah. So, first let me maybe explain to maybe the people in that are listening that are not clear on what is planning, what is scheduling, what is operations because to me it’s everything in public transit. Because what is planning, planning is what is the system? What are the routes? If you want, if you want to design a new route that’s planning. If you want to change a route that’s planning. If you want to decide, hey, this is how should go on a Monday on [8:00] AM every five minutes on [10:00] AM every seven minutes, that’s planning. So almost everything that a passenger sees Yeah. Planning is not what is the color of the bus that’s not planning or who is the driver is not planning, but all the service that you get. As a passenger, that’s fine. So if you are complaining, Hey, why don’t get a route that takes me to work, that’s a planning related complaint.
Right. why the bus leaves every 30 minutes and not every 15 minutes, what, you know, that’s all planning. Planning is super important. I think planning, and we can talk about the role and so on. Planning is something that used to be very static. So I live in Tel Aviv and, and we also work, the office is in Tel Aviv, and I also go up here in the ceiling. And I’m using public transit almost from, I guess when I was probably 10 years old, something like that. And until today, almost every day. And I’m still taking the same bus roads that they took as 10-year-old kid in Tel Aviv. The same, they go the same way. They stop at the same stops. I think they even have the same timetable. So, and that’s, in many places in the world, it’s very much static.
Maybe it changes every few years, maybe every 20 years, maybe every one year. But it’s definitely not every day or every week or so if you are as a passenger complaining about a certain route more, most likely it won’t change. It’s very hard to make changes even though there are many changes that make sense. But it’s difficult. Why? Because you have lots of constraints. So if you want to change your route, you need to allocate drivers. You need to make sure you have enough budget, you need to make sure the union agreement, your compliance with that and regulation. And so because you are living in such a constrained world, you don’t make changes, not making any changes the easy way. Because then everything just stay the same. Now what we created with Optibus is a way to, okay, put all the complexity inside the system.
Amos Haggiag [00:15:52]:
We are fine with complexity, put everything inside co-regulation, unions, everything. And now let the system make changes as much as you need. Like, you can make it much more dynamic. You can make a change every day if you want. So it’s become easier to do changes in planning now to expense scheduling, quickly. Scheduling is also super important. That’s actually where Optibus started, start from scheduling. And then we developed a lot of planning tools. Scheduling is what every driver and is doing, and what every vehicle is doing. It’s taking the network and actually making it real life operation. And as passengers, we are not really aware of scheduling. Planning is definitely, we are aware what is the route, what is timetable, but we’re not really think about, Hey, this bus is doing this route and then doing that route, and this driver takes a break here, but this is the actual operation.
Amos Haggiag [00:16:48]:
Without that, nothing will work. And scheduling is actually the most complex part and the part that has the most impact on the actual operation cost. So if you don’t solve scheduling, right, you can’t make any change in planning. Yeah. You have to, to do everything in operations. That’s actually something, or will time performance something that I think for passenger very clear. Like, and we, you ask about case studies, so I can talk about that as well in that respect. But when you wait on a bus stop and the bus is supposed to gather in [8:00] AM Yeah. But it’s 10 minutes late, that’s an operational issue. Or even a planning issue, maybe because the time table wasn’t correct, or Yeah. That’s an on-time performance issue. And because of that, you can’t rely on public transit because it’s always late. I can’t rely, I need to get to work.
I will be late to work, so I’ll take my car. So people make decision because of those issues. Those issues can be solved. They can be solved by using data. There is so much data. But we don’t use it. There is data about travel time in every time of the day, every days of the week, every route. There is data about passengers counting how many people are on the bus. If there are many people on the bus, maybe we should have another bus. Maybe we shouldn’t increase frequency. If the bus is empty, maybe you can take a smaller vehicle. Why take a large vehicle? There’s so many things, right. Where you can use based on data, yeah. Data about maintenance data, about demand, where people live, where they work, data about different communities, equity, like who is living here?
Who is my network is serving? Is it the right community that really needs public transit? Or people who actually rely public on cars? And so there is so much data and so much to do. And 0that’s what I think the opportunity is also big in terms of case studies, because I think, so what we’ve seen is that most of the world, octopus is now working all over the world. 2000 cities. We just announced a few weeks ago in Europe, all of Europe Latin America, North America, Africa, Asia Pacific, you know, all over the world, really. Every continent. And what we see is that because we have this global perspective that almost like most of the world, I would say 70% of what we see, I don’t, we don’t see every place, but we see many, 70% of the world is doing all of what?
Amos Haggiag [00:19:27]:
All of what I’ve just said completely. Pen and paper, Excel files, ongoing systems that are completely manual. Literally moving like things on the wall, like we take picture. I have lots of pictures showing it. So, you know, you move from something manual to something that is state of the art, AI, Machine Learning optimization, you get so much value. So we have tons of case studies. So many things you improve efficiencies by, you know, so much millions and millions in, if you are, if you measure it by cost, if you measure on time performance, 20%-30% more on-time performance without increasing cost, we have case studies were we took a system that was in relatively low on performance, improved it in like 20-30%, which is for the passenger is amazing. Life changing, right? It from moving from a system that you can’t rely to moving something very reliable without increasing cost, which is to me almost magical. Like, because when you think about if the bus is late, okay, extend the run time. Okay. If it takes one hour and 30 minutes instead of one hour and 15 minutes. Yeah. So put more buffers and will solve on performance. If you put more buffers, you need more buses, you need more drivers, we are able to do that without needing more drivers. We now, without needing more buses, because need drivers is a resource that you, you don’t have today. Right? We have, we are no drivers available.
It’s a different time now.
Yeah. Different time. So and cost and so on. So I think this is really those are the best case studies where you can improve the performance, but you don’t need to increase costs.
Yeah. I think what you mentioned that a lot of these timetables are prepared and never change. In fact, I remember I created some timetable when we launched a bus service in Delhi in 2008 and 2022, they are still using those timetables. And I actually used Excel sheet. So it was not manual, but it’s close to manual because Excel is as good as manual these days because I was just putting routes here and there and timing, and they’re still using it. So there is no changes. So great to see now, hopefully,
Hopefully soon we’ll be able
To improve Delhi transportation, daily transport. It is in India, we are actually very active in India.
I know that so you got a project with Delhi Transport Corporation DTC now, which is amazing because I would love to see how those timetables change from 2008 to 2022 now.
In India, we can talk about it as well, but India and also many other, so public transit is actually very big in those places.
Oh, Yeah.
India, Latin America, Asia, huge, much bigger than in the US
In term of number of buses, in term of the demand, in term of people. And also the population is big. It’s 1 billion. So I tell people it’s a 20%
Amos Haggiag [00:22:33]:
Capita even on a per capita. So if you look like, like Brazil, one of the statistics that I saw that was amazed me, that if you take just Rio and Sao Paulo, only those two cities, big cities, but still those two cities, they have roughly the same number of bus trips as the entire bus trips in the US.
That’s, I didn’t know that. That’s amazing.
That’s cause in, in Brazil, in those cities, you have about 80% of the population is using buses every day, versus in the US it’s about 5%.
No, it’s huge. I’ve been to Sao Paulo and I see the regular buses and, and there are a lot of push from the policy side as well. The employer gave a pass to employee to use the buses. So there are a lot of incentive for employees also to use. Now, one of the topic you mentioned is the shortage of driver. It’s a huge problem right now, especially North America and Europe. I spoke to a lot of operators and they, they told me that there is shortage of driver and workforce, so they need to reduce certain route and trip because of this. So how do you think that the planning, installing can help to address the challenge of driver shortage? Or it’s not.
The other point I want to check with you, because you’re working in this space for so long, A lot people are now betting on autonomous mobility, and they feel like once you have autonomous fleet probably don’t need driver and workforce, and then all these problem will be solved.
Do you think autonomous mobility will address the driver shortage issue or it’ll not have any impact?
Okay, so first driver shortage is an issue, and it’s a global issue. It’s actually very interesting to me that you have the same pain point of shortage of driver in completely different places in the world, like in the us, in Europe, in Israel, in Singapore, in Australia, in like. How can it be that all of these places are missing drivers? Now COVID is one, one reason, but it’s not the only reason because COVID made it. You know, it was becoming much more dangerous to be a bus driver. And many bus drivers decided to go to other jobs. And also there was lot of layoff during COVID because public transit was stopped completely.
Stopped or less needed
And because of that, now bring back the drivers. That was one issue, but it was also before COVID and we see many drivers moving to other jobs. We can talk a lot of about what are the reasons pay is one, but there is also other reasons. But so how can Optibus help? Clearly we can’t just increase let’s say the wages for drivers by using planning systems or not something that more political and maybe like depends on budget of operators. They can do those type of things. But what, we are helping is actually quite a lot in that respect. One is that we’ve seen that a lot of the retention issues happens because the shifts of driver do not match the lifestyle of drivers are looking. So for example, what was very common in public transit is something called split shifts, where a driver will come working in the morning.
So one of the issues in transit is that you have peak in the morning. And in the afternoon, because clearly people go to work, and go back. So you need a lot of trips in morning, a lot of trips in afternoon, you need less bus trip, let’s say [12:00] PM So just because of this natural behavior, you need many drivers in certain time, many drivers in the evening, and you don’t need so many drivers in the middle of the day. So how can you solve that problem? One way they solve it is that you bring drivers for let’s say 4-5 hours. You send them home unpaid, by the way. And then you bring them back in afternoon, evening, which is very, if you think about it, it’s a very tough work schedule.
Amos Haggiag [00:26:36]:
Like you go for a few hours, you get back, you go again, you go, right. So what we did is that you are using sophisticated scheduling method and optimization. You’re able to reshuffle the shift so that you have way less split sheets. You still have some, but you have less than before. And because of that, you can bring more drivers to take those kind work. Other things that you can adjust shift to the hours that drivers will prefer working, let’s say part-time work, things like that. So that’s one thing. The second thing is just the total optimization of the system to be able to do the same with less resources. So we had customers coming to us and say, Hey, we have 20% less drivers. We need to cancel trips. We need to cancel service. Which is the worst thing you can do.
Amos Haggiag [00:27:27]:
Because once you start doing that, people use bus less again. So what they did is that they optimize the entire system to be able to do it with, you know, less 20% bus drivers or something like that. Scheduling planning can be very significant. Also, the rostering optimization. Yeah. In, in solving driver related issues regarding autonomous vehicles. So a few things. I mean, first, I mean, I think like yeah, it’s a great technology and I think it can improve safety for, especially for private cars. Public transit is already very safe. Even with human driver, by the way, 20 x safer than a private car than your car. If you move for taking car to taking a bus, you are 20 x safer, less likely to be involved in a traffic accident.
Amos Haggiag [00:28:30]:
The best thing you can do if you want to improve your safety better than taking autonomous car. So but yeah, it’s definitely it is important for safety. And then you, it’s also in a way to reduces cost, right? Because you don’t need a driver, but that’s theory. For taxis, I think it’s huge because the taxi, the driver cost is so significant, but for bus or rail the thing is that you still need people. It’s not like you, yeah. You need to monitor. And even now you need like human assistant and you also need people to do things that the driver used to do before. Even security related or cleaning or different things like fueling and charging. And so you need the people anyway. So if you look at it, it’s not clear that it’ll make like a huge cost saving and it will solve the driver issues.
Amos Haggiag [00:29:39]:
The second thing is that it looks, technology is always getting push ahead and ahead and ahead, that it’s not clear when it’ll be ready for mass scale public transit, autonomous vehicles. But I think if it we get to that point, then I can envision like much higher frequency vehicles, you can add more trips, you can do things that you couldn’t do because a driver, you need to get him back. Get back the driver back to the depot. And you can do things that you could have a bus on the road all the time. And so you can imagine like a service that is much better and much more efficient. But I think it’s, it will take long time.
It’s still far away. And I agree with you, you know that the role of the driver is not just drive the vehicle, but also greet passenger and make them comfortable and make sure there is somebody’s there neutral who can protect if something happen or fire incident or any emergency. Or he can take bus somewhere else if there is a, you know, some problem or, or passenger fighting or something happens. So, I agree with you either even if we remove driver, we need somebody in the bus. It’s not, you can leave the bus empty on the road and only with passenger. So you need somebody in the bus.
Now other big changes we are seeing in the industry is the electric bus. We are seeing a lot of push for Electrification, and we are seeing a lot of transit agencies are introducing electric buses.
Jaspal Singh [00:31:09]:
One of the key challenge with electric buses, like you mentioned in public transport, we already have a lot of constraints, like driver, workforce, route, the cost. But with electric bus, there’ll be new layer of restrictions like battery charge, battery capacity, driver behavior, load factor, you know? So these things also impact a lot of on the bus performance and then the, the role of battery, state of charge (SoC) and battery, state of health. Because battery will degrade over the period of time, and then you will not get the same efficiency, but you’re getting right now for other buses. So your new bus and the old bus will have a different mileage. Again, I think the role of planning and signaling will further increase, or has to be, do more now to address these new challenges. And, I think like you, what you mentioned the role of artificial intelligent data analytics will be more important. So can you share a little more like how planning and zeroing, like how you’re preparing Optibus internally to move and move transition toward the electrification?
Yeah, so electrification of public transportation, zero emission. The move to zero emission is a very significant part of Optibus is doing. And we were one of the first to invest a lot into that. Because we see that especially in the US and Europe and many other parts of the world, I think generally worldwide you will see it. Everything is moving into zero emissions. Cities, many countries already committed to that in the near future, like 10 years, 15 years. Now, when you want to go to a hundred, let’s say if London want to get 100% zero emission in the next 15 years, they already need to start replacing like now and next year. Cause you know, you have certain time until you can replace everything. So London, for example, I think in the last, think two years ago, something like that announced that the only buying from now on every new bus, it will be electric will be zero emission.
Amos Haggiag [00:33:12]:
So no more diesel bus and not even hybrid. So it’s already happening. China is definitely leading by far. I think they’re already like 70% or something like that. Completely zero emission countrywide. And, Europe is moving fast as well. US as well, especially in California and other states. So this is happening, but we talked before about change and about static systems. You can’t remain static when you have such a big change because yeah, if you want to move to electric and you’re saying, okay, I will change the diesel bus to electric bus, and that’s it. Okay, now the battery is, are you out of battery? So the bus that used to go back and forth now needs to go to a charger. So what do you do? You have a trip, you need another bus, take that trip.
Amos Haggiag [00:34:03]:
And so suddenly you have a change, a big change to your network. You’re actually scheduling that you have to do. And then there is consideration of when do I charge? How long do I charge? Should I use a fast charge or slow charge? Whether impact people on the bus say, I thought the battery will be 60%, is actually 10%. What do I do?
Electricity cost change dramatically throughout the day. So do you want to charge, you want to charge one, it’s cheaper versus when it’s more expensive. So, this is complicated. And to do it efficiently, you have to do all this optimization and also the learning and machine learning to learn from the data. What’s actually the state of charge? What’s the predicted state of charge? So we invested a lot and we are working with the biggest EV fleets in the world. Some of our customers who have customers, for example, in Santiago, Chile, which runs the biggest electric bus fleet outside of China. That’s a big change. A big change, but important change.
Great. And rightly mention, a lot of these complexity you cannot solve with the static pen and paper. You need to have a dynamic system, and you need to bring this machine learning and predictive state of charge. I fully agree with you. That’s more important. Not just knowing what, how much battery is left, but how many kilometer you can complete with your with your battery, with your charge. So that’s important.
Now, one thing you mentioned about earlier is that you’re working with so many clients, and most of these clients are using pen or paper. So there is wide range of these people, and they are implementing the technology for the first time. And it’s a big challenge, you know, when you move from pen and paper to technology and suddenly to cloud and AI, which is you never thought about? So what are the challenges faced by transit agencies while implementing these new solutions? Because that’s important. They want to understand, can I do it or not? And how do you deal with the issue related to change management? How you convince, how do you train or do you work with the team? Like how do you implement this new solution? Like I can imagine the work you’re doing with DTC, they have nothing no automated system. So for them, it’s like a big shift from pen and paper to AI.
Yep. And most of our customers are in such a position. We have customers that also switch systems. So that’s also challenging in any way. It doesn’t matter if they choose from a system, they move from a system or they move from pen and paper, they move from something that they used to do the same way in the last 40-50 years. And that’s always very difficult. There are many ways, and we actually became better at that over time. I think one is that the system is, even though it’s very complicated behind the scenes, and you said AI and, and optimization and cloud and so on, but for the user, it’s actually relatively simple. And it looks more similar to what they used to work with, even pen and paper. It looks similar to, kind of the same visualize that they used to run chart and things like that.
Amos Haggiag [00:37:26]:
But it does everything automatically. So behind the scenes, it’s super complicated math and optimization, but for the user, it’s clicking in button. but I agree with you. It’s a complex change. Both when you are working to convince a customer of using Optibus, and even when they’re convinced, like to implement. And we did huge implementation. We did implementation of companies that are like, let’s say the biggest in the UK, for example, It’s huge. It’s all over the UK. It’s many cities. Each city have many different depots. Each depot has a team of schedulers and planners and super complicated. So we have a team, we have a large team of customer success. Usually they come from, you know, experience from the industry, and many of them did the same, that kind of work before of the being planner schedulers and, and they have lots of knowledge about the public industry.
Amos Haggiag [00:38:33]:
And we work with a very high touch type of product. It’s not a system of Hey, here’s the manual, go and implement it. No, we work with you closely. We know that it’s hard to switch system or switch from pen and paper. We have lots of tools of integrating the data, of automatically getting the data from different protocols because we support all the standard protocols. So we make it easier to start and then depends on the size for small customers, we can sometimes onboard within weeks, months, for large customers, it can take maybe one year. So it’s a project and we sometimes have a team of people working on that. But it’s in the end like, you need to get this confidence because if you don’t have the people that actually use the system. To be confident that it can actually work for them and they can use it day to day, doesn’t matter, all these algorithms and all this stuff.
Amos Haggiag [00:39:28]:
Right. You need to have the people confident that they can do their daily job. Some of those people, they think the computer will replace them. So they worry that, hey, if I go with the system, maybe I may not have a job, which is clearly not correct. And historically, like when you look at all technologies, it never replaces any job. You just can do so much more now with it too. And we never replace anyone in their job. It’s just having more capacity to do more and more things and improve the performance and optimize the system. So that’s something we put a lot of focus, a lot of investment internally in great customer support, customer success worldwide. We’re doing it in different region, different languages, different cultures.
Yeah. That’s very important, to understand and talk in their own language. Like you said, a lot of these planner in singular, they have a fear that technology will take away my job. So whether I should support that transition or not. But, but like you mentioned, the purpose is not to replace the job, but help them to give them a tool to do it better, faster, and more frequently. Because a lot of these timetables are not changes for ages. The reason for that is they don’t have time to change and make changes in these timetable and, plan with technology they can do much faster. And giving that confidence and winning that user confidence is very important.
Now, another change we are seeing in the industry is la lot of cities are implementing this on-demand transit, and micro transits is actually emerging as a big alternative to fixed route service, which are not viable.
Jaspal Singh [00:41:07]:
Like a lot of cities in the night trip, smaller suburb area, or your shift, which are not profitable. They are changing. They are completely stopping the fixed line service and actually doing this on-demand transit. You are right now working mostly in the fixed line service. What are your views on this, on-demand buses? And one of the key challenge a lot of operators are telling me is they face with integrating the fixed-line service with on-demand because there are not many tools available how they can integrate their first client with On-demand. So how do you think one can solve that challenge?
Yeah, so I think first on demand, definitely as its place. And we do see places where it’s it makes sense. We have partners with many on-demand providers globally. So in many cases our customers of us will use Optibus and will use on-demand providers. I think it makes sense, especially in places with low demand. So instead of having a bus goes, go into a certain part of the city, like a neighborhood or something like that where there are only two passenger an hour or something like that. And, and you need to have very low frequency. So it’s not really a good service for passenger when you have every one, every hour you have a trip coming. And it’s also quite costly to one, that bus that is empty. It may make more sense to have a vehicle comes on-demand, smaller vehicle. So in some situation you can model it and show that, that it makes sense. I think the, the issue that, that I’ve seen is many on demand projects are failing by the way, right now. In Tel Aviv, there was a huge, one of the biggest in the world, I think, on-demand service pilot that run for a few years, and now they stopped it just two or three days ago. I don’t know if you took that service.
No, I haven’t. I haven’t, but I didn’t know that they have stopped it now.
Yeah, they stopped it as of end of 2022. And I think because that wasn’t like a good use of funding demand. So the problem why they stopped it is that it had it was very costly to operate, like the per Trip subsidy was too high. Even as high as taking like a private tax when you look at how much you subsidize every person trip. So why, because I think when you have high demand, like in Tel Aviv, center of Tel Avib, high demand, the most efficient way of taking people is with mass transit. I would even say that the bus system in Tel Aviv is not even efficient enough, even though the buses are full of people, like you need metro system, you need the IRO system to move millions of people in high frequency.
Amos Haggiag [00:44:01]:
It doesn’t make sense to put, I don’t know, hundreds or thousands or millions of small vehicles that will take two people here or two people there from your door to door. The problem is that you can that it sounds good. Like when you tell someone, Hey, I have an app. You book a vehicle, it takes you from home to work and it’ll arrive in a few minutes. It sounds so much better than going to a bus stop, wait for 10 minutes, go on bus with many people maybe standing the entire trip taking a stop. That is far away from my work. I prefer to take a door to door trip. So it’s true, it’s better, but it also costs much more.
Yeah.
So when it costs much more, you need to, does it make sense to put a budget into that? Or does it make sense to build like a, you know, much more bus routes or when you think about this way, then it makes more sense in many cases to invest more in improving the fixed route system because it can move people much more efficiently. But because it sounds good, you have so many pilots that are running and most of them are failing. But I, having said that, I do think on-demand in many cases makes a lot of sense. And then you need to start thinking about how to integrate it system-wide because okay, once you understood on the backbone of public transit, you need mass transit, high frequency that will move the masses on maybe places with less demand.
Amos Haggiag [00:45:40]:
You can use like on demand vehicles. How do we make sure that everything is integrated correctly? So one example, you may have a bus route that goes all over the place. Because it needs to pick everyone in coverage. Now you want to make it high frequency route on the corridor. But now there are places where how do they, you know, used to have service and they don’t have anymore. So you need to compliment with potentially on-demand. Not always on-demand is the right choice, but there is also micro mobility in other ways. But Yeah, I think today we are getting to a place where we holistically look at the entire system versus rail separately, bus separate on demand, separate bike lanes, separate. Like we need to look at everything together.
I fully agree with you. I think that’s how this system will work. And in fact, we are seeing why micro mobility is more successful in Europe because in integrating with the public transit compared to the US, because there is no backbone, there is no public transit system. So it doesn’t work like that. And I agree with you on-demand can be a feeder can be a feeder to a fixed line service, high demand service, and it can work, but it cannot work in isolation with public transit because then the cost and, and what you said is absolutely right. I know certain city where the cost is per passenger is more than $50 per trip, which is like than take the Uber.
More. You can just take an Uber.
Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. So instead of that give people option to book Uber and, and take it because it’s even cost clearer than that.
By now, another issue is if you look in those places, like here in Tel Aviv, for example, or the people that are using the system, mostly rich people. Why? Because they don’t want to use the bus system. And that’s a more kind of luxury van they can take. Okay, fine. But why should the country pay for rich people public transit system? That doesn’t make sense. Right. Go take a taxi or something. So that’s another.
Yeah, I mean it should ultimately complement to go to public transit, and we should not differentiate, I mean, invest more money in the public transit if you have Now one of the thing we saw Optibus growth in last two year. I mean, that’s remarkable and amazing. So big congratulations to you and the whole team because in last two years, like Optibus was in 500 city in August 2021, and now I, like you mentioned last couple of week back, you post this about that now you’re in 2000 cities across the globe. You have client in all five continent. You mentioned Asia, Africa, Latin America, North America, Europe, and working with so many transit companies mm-hmm. Now you are interacting, and I know as a founder, you must be looking each city and each client and each transit system. What did you observe?
Like, did you observe any similarity or difference between these transit system in different city and do you find some of the best practices would you like to share from different continent? Like you find, this is happening very good in Europe, and this is happening very good in Latin America. Like you mentioned Santiago, Chile, they implemented this electric pass, huge electric passport project. What are the best practices you have seen in different cities?
So yeah, we definitely work in so many places around the world. And it’s interesting to see that those places are very different. But in public transit in many ways, they’re very similar. One is a driver shortage issue, which was always like mystery for me. How can it be that or driver shortage in completely different places in the world? Like what is the economy behind it that created such a phenomenon? But for example, it’s Latin America. There isn’t an issue with drivers’ shortage. So it’s not everywhere, but you see it in many places.
EV something that definitely, I can say almost everywhere there is either already mandate in place there is moving into zero emission either more aggressively or starting, but even like we work in Africa, India,.
Uganda a country with no public transit and now they’re building the first public transit system in the city which is very interesting project. And, we can talk only about that if you want, but in Kampala, Africa, they’re deploying electric buses. so they understand that, you know, it’s important for sustainability and longer term. It’s the solution also in terms of cost and so on. So that’s another similarity I would say we see everywhere in the world. Everywhere in the world. Same pinpoint, same annual methods, same static system. So that’s everywhere you go, doesn’t matter if it’s a very developed world. You go to Germany, you go to London, or you go to less developed places in the world it’s all manual in town. London, for example, all the public transit system in the city was done using a certain manual kind of excel type of work to design the timetable and the routes.
Amos Haggiag [00:51:09]:
London, not like I guess in best practices one in terms of driver shortage. So there are actually many, many, many best practices I think we see and we tell our customers, some of them are very small, some of them are bigger.
In terms of EV, we can talk about that. Best practices, we see this EV as a service, as something that that, that works really well. So let’s say you are an operator, an agency, and you only need like three electric buses, like many have in the beginning. Does it make sense to create an electric depot and putting chargers and investing so much in infrastructure only for three buses? So we, if you have thousands of buses, it makes sense. But so there are ways to do it. Like, almost like leasing where you, you only pay and you take, like, there is a certain depot that service different customers and things like that.
Amos Haggiag [00:52:16]:
That’s something we see in many places. And it becoming, I think, more and more standard. And it can help like kickstarting, the EV driver shortage. We see some ways of dealing with that in different places. In the UK for example, the user method called rotation – rotating rosters. So when you have a work on a certain week, the next week you have a different type of work. So if you are a driver that gets a bad shift that you don’t want, but someone needs to do that. In the US, and in other places in the world, you may get the same shift for like six months. Then, so as soon as you get some proposal from another company, you leave. Right. now if you update it, then every week you get something else then suddenly, you know, it’s okay, one week you get a bad shift, you.
Amos Haggiag [00:53:11]:
So things like that we see, we see this is a small thing, but many of those things we see, like, let’s say interlining routes many places they use like kind of the bus is going the same route, back and forth, back and forth the same route. And if you interline routes, if you’re doing one route and another route, you can get to much more efficiency in the system. Many things that we just learned from customers, and we bring it as best practices to other customers around the world.
Amazing. I think the point you mentioned about rotation of driver, it’s a big thing because in North America, especially in US and Canada, you get route based on seniority. So if you’re senior, you get the best route. And if you’re a new person, you get the worst route. So that’s why a lot of driver don’t want to join because they don’t want to go to the shit route. So they want Yeah.
If you’re a new driver, you also get the, the worst pay. You get the worst pay the worst route. Like, you have all the incentive in the world to leave the job.
Great. Thanks for sharing these best practices. And I think that’s the best part of working in so many cities. You can see, and you can observe, and you can share with other people, like how you can do, solve that problem.
Now, 2022 was an amazing year for Optibus. You achieved many milestones. You raised more than a $100 million, including strategic investment from Volvo. Would love to know more. Like what was that investment and how it’ll be partnered with Optibus. What are your future plans for 2023? Or, I would say, what can we expect in next two years from Optibus?
So yeah, we have some strategic investors. Volvo is just makes so much sense because they’re one of the largest public transit bus OEMs, bus manufacturers in the world both for public transit and for coach. And also a big player in the EV space. So we just saw them in almost every customer that we have. So we just make sense to combine partnership there and also with other strategic investor that we have. Each one brings their own angle.
I think in terms of plans first in terms of the product we are investing a lot in few areas. One is EV okay. There is so much more to do in EV and we see it. I think, what the main change that we see now is that EV is moving from small scale to now large scale. And when you move to large scale, you have new problems. For example, many buses are charging on the same time, and now you have an issue of electricity.
The Grid issue
Grid issue and prioritization between different vehicles. Who should charge first? Maybe one vehicle should charge first than the other because, there is a trip in five minutes. So many things that we see. Only once you start rolling more and more EVs, you’re starting seeing more and more problems. So we’re investing quite a lot in that. We’re doing a lot of investment in, let’s call it real time aspects of public transit. So we didn’t touch that, but think about it. You did the great, you did a great plan, you did great schedule, but now you have a traffic jam.
Yeah.
So everything collapsed. Like all the plan now collapsed. Right? the bus needs to get to the second street, but it will be late. It’ll be late. And the next one will be late. The next one. The next one. So you have to solve it in real time. So now you have a scheduling planning problem, but in real time, and it has to be solved within one minute. And so many things around the real time aspect, we are putting a lot of focus in the next few years and keep it expanding. Optibus is in 2000 cities, but it’s still small part of the world, even though it sounds like a lot, many of the countries that we are, we just started, like India for example. We just started in India. India is a huge place.
Amos Haggiag [00:57:23]:
Latin America. We expanded in Brazil very rapidly and now in Chile, now in other countries. And we just see the same issues everywhere. And we think Optibus can bring so much value to so many places in the world. Africa is a place where for the first time, public transit will be available for so many cities in Africa. Game changer for the people in Africa, which only 5% of the population is use using as a car. So people walk to work or they use unofficial public transportation systems. So building an official public transit that you can trust. That is high frequency, that move the masses will be game changer. And being part of this project where for the first time Optibus can be used to build a new, usually we come to a customer, they already have an existing system. We just make it better. Now you design from scratch, that’s scratch. Amazing. And the biggest impact you can have.
Yeah. And it’s also amazing to see, you know, when you construct something from zero, like there is no base and you build it from there. So you can also do a lot of experimentation and make it much better. Can be an example. I mean, in future you can share the compile example with many other city, like how they build, and using that service with.
Thanks for sharing that. And I agree with you. The priority you mentioned EV, real time scheduling and expanding into more cities. That’s make much more sense now.
That’s a big part, you know, scaling up a startup because lot of founders, they launched startup, but many of them failed to scale it up because it’s really harder. It’s 10 time, or I would say a 100 time harder to scale up a company. You started in Tel Aviv, but now I would say Optibus is a global company in more than 25 countries all over the world. Can you share some of the lesson from your entrepreneurial journey? Like how do you build from like a company, from your garage now a global company in a public transit space? And also how are you managing a global company while in Tel Aviv? The good part is you are in the central, so you can see both east and west time, but at the same time it means you’re working 24 hours.
So I’m not managing every person in the company clearly, but yeah. So we have 400 people now working at Optibus in 25 countries. We have 12 offices. We build Optibus very distributed in a way. So it’s not like centrally, you know, I’m making all the decisions and telling everyone what to do. It’s definitely not working like that. So we have different regions. It’s region of its own kind of management. And they can make local decisions about the region. Because we have customers in so many places, you have to distribute the decision making. I think we are fortunate to have people that are really committed to the company’s mission and very much aligned with the company’s values, and vision. People that are intersection between being a transit nerd.
People that know, you know, only take public transit and they know all the, the routes in their city and things like that. And also advocate for innovation that wants to use technology to make better public transportation, impact driven people that deeply care about future of the industry, the society, the planet. A lot of us care deeply about improving sustainability and also care about their colleagues and, and can help each other to reach their goals. So these are the values that we look when we recruit and it helps us to build kind of the company culture that transcend countries and regions. So you don’t need to, if you hire the right people and make sure they have the same values and culture and mission, you don’t need to micromanage every day.
And, I think that’s very important for any scale up startup. Like you need to build a right team, right. Kind of people. And who can more passion driven, like one of the point you mentioned, I wish all the public transit companies management should be using public transport because a lot of time these people who are heading or leading these public transit agencies, they never use public transit. So they never experience what is the passenger going through. So the point you mentioned that people who are working with octopus are also public transport nerd because they use the system and they saw firsthand what are the challenges?
Yeah. And we also make it easier for them because one, everything, every office that we have is on a transit hub. So you can get by rail, by bus many buses. We saw an issue if some of our employees are telling us the office is on a transit hub, but I don’t live on a transit hub, so don’t have a bus or that go or a rail that comes from my house. So, but I have one that is maybe two miles away. So what we did is that we brought all employees bike or scooters, electric or non-electric, depends on what they want so they can get to the bus or the rail. So we have almost, I think 90%, something like that of our employees are getting to work either public transit or walking or biking. Yeah.
Well, that’s amazing. That’s, that can be a good practice for all the companies, you know, like those who are working in mobility sector. Make sure your employees are connected with mobility option and use public transport or other sustainable mobility option, and reach their destination. Thank you for sharing that practice, Amos.
Now this is my last question. Optibus has raised more than $262 million till date, which is amazing in term of fundraising. But generally, I saw VC from like B2C, you know, business to customer or B2B business segment. They don’t like Business to Government B2G. Like I talk to VCs and I said it is B2G and they say like, oh, big no, no, because the sales cycle is long, it’s unpredictable, you know. They don’t want to work with government and all, but you are one of the company which is successful in B2G sector. I mean, you have B2B space as well, but B2G is your biggest game play. Can you share what is your secret mantra to raise funding and convince investor about B2G and what are the key challenges faced by the startup in transit and mobility space? Like what challenges you face in the initial year to convince people or the government agencies to work with Optibus?
Yeah, so first Optibus is B2B and B2G. So we do have customers on the B2B space which really helped us in the beginning because it was much faster to get them on board and self-cycle and things like that. Today we are definitely focused a lot on B2G. I wouldn’t say that VCs are not interested in B2G. They are VCs that definitely, I agree with you, that that will not want to focus on video. But there are also many VCs that are looking at these type of companies. I think in the end, VCs are investing kind of very structured way. So they look at the company, they look at the growth of the business. Yeah. They looked at customer retention. So if you are growing the business, but customer lives and they churn, so that means something.
Amos Haggiag [01:04:50]:
Maybe the product is not good enough and it’s not sticky enough. Maybe it doesn’t give a lot of value. Maybe it was too expensive. So they look at the growth, but they also look at the churn, and then they also look at the unit economics because, hey, if I pay my customer to use my system, then obviously they will use it. Maybe <laugh>, but I mean, you, you know what I’m saying? Like, it, it can be not profitable. Yeah. Like you can sell it. Yeah. many companies invest a lot in customer acquisition and then they get unprofitable business. So I think if VC, when they, when it sees a company, it doesn’t matter if it’s B2G or B2B, the market is large enough. The company is going and, you know, you mentioned 500 cities, 1,000 cities to the exponentially goal going the unit economics make sense.
Amos Haggiag [01:05:35]:
Hey, we are selling a product that gives value. We are charging for that product. People are paying, it’s profitable. So, and customers love the product, both of what they’re saying, case studies and interviews, but also in reality, they don’t churn. They use stay with Optibus for many, many, many years. So you can model it and say, okay, I will, this is Optibus today. Optibus in five years, it keeps to go exponentially. It keeps expanding, it keeps developing the product. Customer love the product, so they will stay okay. The company can be a very large financially, so then it makes sense as a financial investment. I think that once you build the model this way it doesn’t really matter if it’s B2G or B2B or, yeah.
Jaspal Singh [01:06:21]:
So, your basically, I understood is that that stick to the basic like focus on customer stickiness, have low churn rate. It means like whether your customer, like your product or not, and have a growth a strong growth by building, you know, diversified team and bringing right people at the right time and grow. And then, you know, you don’t need to worry about anything else because then people will understand what you’re doing and how you’re growing.
Great. I agree with you. Thanks for sharing that. I mean, sometime people, it’s hard to understand basic because people look flashy thing, they forget about basic. So, so thanks for sharing these basic things.
Thank you Amos like we discussed mobility, we discussed this latest technology trends and public transport. Now it’s time to learn a little more about you. And to do that we have this Rapid-Fire question round. So generally we ask this quick five questions to all the guests and an ask them to answer them quickly. So whenever you’re ready, I’ll just start with my first question.
Okay, go ahead.
Okay. So my first question is, if you were not in technology or public transit sector, what other profession you would’ve selected?
Huh I actually thought at some point when I finished my first degree at university, I wanted to stay and doing a PhD and becoming going more on the research side, on the math, maybe computer science. At some point in my life I even really loved physics. So I think if it wasn’t on the teaching side, you know, and, maybe I was like a professor in some university or something like that.
Oh man, I mean, you would be an amazing professor even today. So you should share your experience with people. Great thought. Now you have travelled all over the world and I’m sure, I don’t know if you have already visited all of them, like in all the cities, but you must have traveled a lot around the world. So which is your favorite city in the world?
Well, depends, I guess if it’s a city, like for city kind of trip, I will probably say London is my favorite. but if it’s more nature, then Italy, like north of Italy is my favorite place to go. Many places in that area. Lake Garda, that area will go like on vacation anytime.
Amazing. London is everybody’s favorite for the city, but great to know about the Northern Italy and all. Now this will be a hard question for you. Like you mentioned, you’re using public transit in Tel Aviv, so I’m pretty sure whenever you’re going anywhere in the world, you’ll be using public transit.
Yeah.
Which city has the best public transit network in the world?
So I don’t think I can answer that question because I didn’t use all the public transit system in the world, and I’m sure that there are, let’s say, great transit system in Japan, for example. I haven’t been there. So I don’t know. But let’s say from the transit system that I used. I would say maybe, maybe not the most common, I guess answer, but I think London is the best one.
London is the best one.
Even though I know many people, like we have a large office in London. I know that many people are complaining all the time, but to me it’s high frequency. I think it’s one of the only series that I see that really respect buses.
Yeah.
They respect buses. I mean, buses are for everyone and they look good and double deckers, and they’re designed well. And you can see all the city from like, it’s, you want to, you want to take a bus. In many other cities, buses are a way that you prefer to take the, the metro. And I think in London, like I would take the bus if it’s almost anytime. And I think the second thing is that it’s one of the easiest systems for fare collection. Like, it’s seamless for anyone, especially for tourists. It’s always for a tourist in a new city, you don’t know how to use the, the bus system. How do I pay, where do I buy tickets? What ticket should I use in London? It’s super easy.
I agree. And I think London is the one where the open loop payment ticketing started. So they did a lot of innovation at TfL. Great, I agree with London is one of the best. Now what one thing do you wish you should have learned early in your career or in your life?
I think one thing that I learned, the Optibus I mean, I knew somewhat before, but I definitely at Optibus, I became much more aware is let’s call it sustainability or even global warming. I knew about it, but I guess I didn’t pay enough attention. And because people here in Optibus are so passionate about the topic, we do a lot of work internally about both sustainability and also ESG. And I think that’s something that if I knew earlier, I would change a bit of the way that, that I’m my behavior, and things that, that I’m doing differently.
Great answer. I love your answer. That’s really a different perspective, you know, learning about the sustainability thing. It’s important. I agree with myself as well. Like, I learned it little later when I start working in public transit. I wish I’d know this earlier. So one can do more thing, life would be more sustainable.
Now, this is my last question. If you can change one thing in life, what would it be?
One thing in my life? I think I could have started Optibus earlier. Yeah, I think so. I think it took a long time to do that. Like you saw like 10 years
Too of working on it before we start. Like I think we could have been now in 2023 in a place where we already five years from now, and that’s, that will be in completely different place. So we started off, it was a bit late than I, than I wish we could, but again, it’s, in hindsight, it’s all because of confidence. We weren’t sure is it’s large enough, is it big enough problem to solve? But in hindsight, yeah, we could have started five years earlier.
Yeah. But I would say you are still at the right place, right time and doing such an amazing job with so many different cities, and trying to improve. So thank you so much you know, for your great insight. I really love this conversation and your perspective on different things. And also, you know, your passion for the sector, that’s like really impressed me that it’s not just a business for you, it’s something you are really passionate about and you want to spend next 20 year or 30 year in this space.
Great. Thank you so much Elon. Thank you. Having me on this podcast.
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Introduction
Public transit ridership is recovering slowly and has reached an average 80% of the pre-pandemic level. However, it is important to highlight that different countries are in different recovery phases. Secondly, the riders traveling patterns have changed and there are more riders on weekends, and peak hours are flattened. Public transit agencies need to adjust to this changing behavior. On the other hand, transit agencies around the globe are facing challenges with staffing as there is a shortage of drivers and workers. Thus, the role of planning and scheduling has become more critical to provide services to riders. Transit agencies will face new challenges with the induction of electric buses as the buses will have a limited range. Thus, the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning will allow transit agencies to build dynamic schedules. Further, on-demand mobility can complement fixed-line services. This episode will share the story of Optibus and how the company is helping to digitalize public transit agencies.
Amos Haggiag is the CEO and co-founder of Optibus, a cutting-edge software platform that powers complex public transportation operations in more than 2,000 cities worldwide. Before co-founding Optibus in 2014, Amos led the development of large-scale personalization engines as a senior software development engineer at Microsoft and designed machine learning algorithms at Siemens. He is the recipient of several prestigious math and technology awards, including the Intel Prize (for software engineering), the Elkin Prize (for information technology) and the Wolf Prize (for mathematics).
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