Room: International AB
Sponsor(s)
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Session Description
Leap of Faith: Taking the Gloves Off for a Shared Vision
Stream: Leadership Stream
Moderator: Catherine Baldelli
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)
Bio:
(R) EVOLUTIONIZING URBAN MOBILITY
GREATER CITIES THROUGH GREATER MOBILITY
Arjan is passionate about creating greater cities through greater mobility: at this time it is about understanding the options to building back public transit combined with MicroTransit and MicroMobility. How can we use technology to provide to everyone in the community access and choice to their destination?
REDEFINING MOBILITY TO CREATE CONVENIENT, EFFICIENT AND EFFECTIVE ACCESS TO DESTINATIONS FOR EVERYONE
Arjan is engaging in activities to guide change processes to move from operations focused transportation toward Mobility as a Service, making the next step from Micro-Transit, Automated Vehicles, Fully Electric & OnDemand technologies to integrated mobility concepts for urban areas.
ITS & PUBLIC TRANSPORT
Arjan began his career with urban traffic systems and learned how traffic modeling and traffic signal prioritization can improve road capacity. He helped put in place ITS, CAD/AVL systems and passenger information systems in public transportation.
LEADING TECHNOLOGY IMPLEMENTATIONS AND DEVELOPMENTS
As a product manager, Arjan has coordinated development efforts and lead problem resolution efforts. He leads selection of partner and subcontractors for projects up to $100M.
BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT AND SALES MANAGEMENT
Arjan has more than 10 years of experience in building sales teams and developing new foreign markets. In his various roles, he has also been responsible for recruiting and hiring sales-, technical sales- and marketing managers. Arjan’s transportation experience is global: He has worked in the Netherlands, Italy, France, Germany, United States, Canada and Switzerland.
Bio:
Principal and founder of CSched, a consultant firm with extensive international experience in transit operations planning. Undertook serveral service efficiency analyses and audit to develop and implement alternate scheduling practices to reduce operating costs and improve tansit system performance.
Provided scheduling training, coaching and assistance to transit agencies for running time calibration, timetabling, vehicle blocking, operator run cutting. Supported labor negociations to price-tag current, proposed and negotiated labor rules.
Specialties: Mass transit operations planning, manual and computer-assisted. HASTUS scheduling software. Scheduling efficiency evaluation and improvement.
John Lyons – Director of Joint Industry Councils & Collective Bargaining, Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU)
Bio:
Moderator(s)
Catherine Baldelli – (Retired) Director of Transit, City of Burlington