You can't always learn everything about what a transit agency needs from a dashboard. A dispatcher's desk at 6 a.m. will tell you more. That's part of what Jennifer Bentley, our Senior Vice President of Marketing, and Shoshi Goldstein, our Product Marketing Team Lead, found last week, spending the day with Niagara Transit at its headquarters in St. Catharines and its garage in Niagara Falls.
Niagara Transit was formed in 2023 by bringing five separate transit operators into one system. Today it serves all 12 municipalities in Ontario's Niagara Region, delivering more than 10 million rides a year across 99 local and intermunicipal routes, with a fleet of more than 160 buses.
The goal for their visit was simple: spend time with the people who run the operation day to day, not just the team that uses Optibus. That meant meeting drivers, HR, schedulers, dispatchers, and leadership across the agency.
Niagara Transit uses Optibus for planning, scheduling, and rostering, operations, and the driver app and bidding. But a visit like this wasn’t about any one product. It was about understanding how all of it fits into a single day of running a service, for the people actually doing it.
What the whole team agreed on
Across the visit, from the office to the dispatch floor, Shoshi highlighted one point that came up again and again: technology can't replace the driver.
Drivers are the face of the agency to every rider who steps on board, and some calls will always need human judgment. In our 2026 State of Bus Driver Retention report, every one of the 400 drivers surveyed said they've had to explain delays to passengers without accurate information themselves. That's why what reaches the driver matters as much as what happens in the back office.
Our platform is built to support the people making those calls, not replace them. The goal isn't to take judgment out of the job, it's to give the people making those calls better information to make them with.
About working with Optibus
When asked to describe Optibus in one word, Adam Arbour, Niagara Transit's Director of Transit Operations, didn't hesitate: "adaptive."
That kind of feedback means more coming from someone running day-to-day operations than from any product demo.
A cake, some socks, and an afternoon that mattered
The visit wasn't all business. Jennifer and Shoshi brought a cake decorated to look like one of Niagara's new buses, along with socks and swag for the team.
.jpg?width=5712&height=4284&name=IMG_7946%20(1).jpg)
Why visits like this change how we build
It is easy, from a distance, to assume what an agency needs. A day spent with drivers, dispatchers, HR, and leadership, not just the people logged into our platform, makes those assumptions much harder to hold onto. Watching Niagara's team plan, dispatch, and run service in real time, and hearing them agree, unprompted, that the driver's judgment still matters most, is the kind of thing that shapes a product roadmap more than any feature request ever could.
"If you ever get the chance to spend a day with a customer, take it," Shoshi said. "You come back knowing exactly who you're building for."
Further Reading:
