Room: International AB
Sponsor(s)
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Session Description
Leap of Faith: Taking the Gloves Off for a Shared Vision by CSched
Stream: Leadership
Moderator: Catherine Baldelli
The driver recruitment and retetion is no longer a temporary disruption. It is a structural crisis, and standard approaches have reached their limits. Securing the future of public transit now requires a leap of faith: a fundamentally new perspective on workforce management and on how we design schedules that serve riders, create attractive and competitive operator jobs, and remain financially sustainable.
Our panel brings a mix of perspectives to the same table: a transit executive, a global union representative, an international scheduling expert, and an optimization software specialist. We will begin by confronting the real constraints that agencies and unions face today, including the practical limits of traditional tools and bargaining frameworks. We will then move to neutral ground and challenge three persistent myths: that there is no money to improve working conditions, that unions will never support meaningful change, and that management will never accept it.
In reality, the status quo already carries significant hidden costs—overtime, churn, service unreliability, and lost ridership—and both labor and management can align when solutions are designed to reduce risk, improve predictability and fairness, and protect service and budget outcomes. This session focuses on bold but practical action. We will present creative, implementable approaches that leverage advanced scheduling practices and modern software capabilities, supported by real-world examples from North America and abroad. The objective is not incremental tuning—it is a credible path to “different and better,” built on shared metrics, controlled pilots, and a shared vision for a sustainable transit workforce.
Speaker(s) / Presenter(s)