The mayor and BPS claim that thanks to the Zum app, the operation of buses is improving

Transportation woes for Boston Public Schools (BPS) families continued this week, but Mayor Wu and Supt. Mary Skipper say operations are improving as a newly implemented app that helps with punctuality “gets smarter and smarter.”

Wu and Skipper addressed the issue Tuesday morning at Columbia Point, outside the recently renamed Ruth Batson Academy, formerly BCLA McCormack School, thanking parents for their patience despite the week-and-a-half of delays faced by 22,000 families who rely on school buses.

“Now on day nine, we’re seeing positive results every day on our on-time performance,” Skipper said. “We’re not where we want to be yet, but we’re headed in the right direction. And we really appreciate the patience of parents as we improve the system.”

BPS measures bus performance based on two key data points — the number of students who arrive within 15 minutes of being late and the number of students who arrive within 30 minutes. Skipper said 90 percent of students currently arrive at school within 15 minutes of the bell. On routes that required major changes or where new students were introduced to a route that required changes, about 98 percent arrived within 30 minutes of the start of school.

She noted there has been a rash of late enrollments and address changes; since Aug. 9, 2,500 new students have joined or had their locations changed.

“I’ll just say, as a mom, every minute of learning is incredibly important for our young people,” Wu said. “And so getting them to school on time isn’t just about making sure we hit certain percentages or numbers. It’s about giving them time to get settled into their classrooms, to eat breakfast, to just have the best day they could possibly have. It all starts with how they get there and how they feel when they get there. That’s based on how we handle bus reliability.”

While there have been stories across the city about bus issues, parents have reported having trouble using the Zum app to get their children to school, find them on the way and make sure they get home.

In one instance last Wednesday (Sept. 11), a 7-year-old boy with autism was supposed to leave the Joseph Lee School on Talbot Avenue for Levant Street at about 2:30 p.m. However, he had not shown up by 4 p.m., prompting family members to call Boston police.

According to BPD, the boy’s mother used the Zum app to track his bus to Navillus Terrace and Winter Street on Meetinghouse Hill, where the bus was parked and idling for 45 minutes with the boy, the driver and a bus monitor on board. Police reported that the driver got lost and did not use the Zum app to help him find his way. The boy was returned to his mother without incident.

Skipper said there had been a lot of learning curve for drivers using the Zum app, but she dismissed speculation that some drivers, unhappy with their contract, were sabotaging the system.

“Sometimes (drivers) would push for things that either ended the route or started the route earlier,” she said. “That also led to some of the numbers being very low. I think about 98 percent of drivers use the app regularly. And what we’ve heard from drivers is that it’s really helpful.”

Skipper said they have been working hard to tweak the app and defended BPS’s move to a more technology-based system to improve efficiency, which peaked at 90 percent last year — five percent below state standards for BPS.

“We were using a notebook and paper printout system that was a 30-year-old system,” she joked.

Skipper and Wu noticed that Zum’s app updates its routes and efficiency algorithms every Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning, so they expected even better results later in the week as the app continues to learn.

“There will be new routes, and drivers will adapt to them,” Skipper said of the update. “But we will correct routes that took longer than they should have. … It will get smarter and smarter every week. And one of the things that attracted us to this technology was its ability to adapt and get smarter and smarter.”

BPS Transportation Director Dan Rosenberg said the app isn’t just about route efficiency, but safety and transparency — a theme echoed by Wu. The app lets parents and bus drivers specify pick-up and drop-off locations and times.

“Also, if a bus is delayed by more than 20 minutes, a push notification is automatically sent to inform families,” he added.

The mayor said her instincts are to “know what’s happening on the ground,” which is why she, Skipper and senior transportation officials have committed to driving several problem routes across the city this week to get a picture of the situation on the ground and see what’s going well and what’s going wrong.