Boston, MA

Not sure what this sensationalist headline is about. Zum has been pretty damned good in my experience since last Thursday. There were tons of kinks that needed to be ironed out and clearly there were situations where bus drivers screwed up bad. But honestly, I’ve been impressed with the app and IMO the kinks will be ironed out. It has brought the BPS bussing system to a whole new level of transparency. I can tell down the SECOND where my child and my child’s bus are. Before, you’d get a phone call saying the bus is running late or they couldn’t find a bus driver.

This reminds me of when Stockholm launched the school platform system, a system that would ease and centralize access to school resources, but after spending a billion SEK it was shit, so a group of parents took the matter into their own hands and built a new app that interacted with the API calls of the system, the new app was great, so the city called the police on the parent group, but the police investigation showed that the parents app only used the information the city had published themselves, nothing illegal had taken place.

Then the city changed gears and worked with the group of parents.

Here is a summary:

https://linustechtips.com/topic/1387097-their-school-app-didnt-work-so-they-built-an-open-source-alternative-then-the-schools-called-the-cops/

Flynn cited a Globe report that only 34% of buses were on time on the first day of school last week - down from 61% last year and the worst on-time performance in nearly a decade.

What happened that <34% of busses couldn't make it on time?