Some transit agencies are winning on bus driver retention. They're not necessarily paying more than their peers. They're not operating in easier markets. What they share, almost without exception, is a different set of priorities; in how they build schedules, how they run depots, and who they put in leadership roles.
To find out, we brought together people who have lived this problem from very different vantage points.
Chris Pangilinan ran bus operations at NYC Transit. Eyal Carmel has spent years researching why transit workers leave. Paulo Ribeiro drove buses for years before moving to the industry's operational side. And Waiching Wong, our VP of Customer Success, spends her days working with agencies around the world who are navigating this in real time. Together, they went deep on our global survey of 400 drivers - and the conversation got specific fast.
Here are the five takeaways every transit leader should act on.
1. Build Schedules Around People, Not Just Costs
Most transit schedules are built around one primary variable: cost. That's understandable, but as Chris put it:
"When we develop our bus schedules, it's a lot of the time an optimization around economics. It's not an optimization around mental health, it's not an optimization for job satisfaction."
The result is a system that consistently hands the hardest work to the people least positioned to absorb it: new recruits on the extraboard, driving overnight splits, with the youngest families and the least leverage.
The shift agencies can make isn't about abandoning cost discipline. It's about building driver-friendliness into the scheduling process from the start. Real breaks, realistic recovery time, and financial incentives for the difficult pieces of work that are currently just handed to whoever has the least seniority. The pick system in many agencies hasn't meaningfully changed since the 1980s. That's the starting point for reform.
Waiching's framing is useful here: some of these changes cost money, and agencies need to be clear-eyed about that. But treating better schedules as an investment rather than an expense changes the calculation. The hidden costs of the status quo including turnover, retraining, lost institutional knowledge, service gaps, rarely show up on a single line in a budget, but they're real and they add up.
2. Treat Communication As Part Of The Schedule, Not An Afterthought
Drivers with stable rosters are 2.6x more likely to stay long-term. But stability isn't only about what's on the roster. Eyal made the point clearly: "Predictability is not just scheduling. It's also about how you communicate the changes and the unexpected events."
Disruptions happen. What agencies can control is whether drivers feel informed and supported when they do, or left to figure it out alone.
The practical implication is straightforward: invest in the communication infrastructure that keeps drivers in the loop in real time, and train the people who talk to drivers - dispatchers, supervisors, controllers - to treat that communication as a core part of their role, not a secondary one.
There's a passenger dimension here too. When riders don't have real-time information, their frustration lands on the driver.
Waiching put it well: "The experience for the customer starts even before the vehicle. If we lessen the tensions in the room, the operator can focus on what they're actually there to do." Better passenger communication is, in that sense, also a driver wellbeing investment.
3. Make Voluntary Overtime Genuinely Voluntary
Nearly 95% of drivers in our survey work unscheduled overtime, and intent to stay drops sharply beyond around six extra shifts per month. The fix isn't simply asking drivers to work less but restructuring how overtime is offered and incentivised so that it feels like a real choice.
Chris outlined what that looks like in practice: match service levels to actual driver availability, build overtime into scheduled pieces of work as an explicit option, and offer genuine financial incentives for the routes and hours that are hardest to fill. As he noted, the routes that get picked last are easy to identify and those are the ones that need better incentives attached to them. Agencies that get this right stop relying on obligation and start building a pool of drivers who actively want extra work.
Waiching's shorthand is worth keeping: "It's about having those brave conversations up front, looking at the way we're scheduling from the beginning." That's where the overtime problem gets solved - in the planning stage and definitely not the morning scramble.
4. Invest in The Dispatcher Relationship
When drivers believe the scheduling process is fair, they are 6x more likely to stay. That's the number that should be on every agency leader's desk. And the most direct lever for fairness, day to day, is the dispatcher.
Dispatchers are the human face of the agency to drivers on the road. How they're selected, trained, and empowered determines whether drivers feel backed up or abandoned.
Eyal's recommendation was practical: "Help the dispatcher support the driver. Empower them, train them, give them the technology - but look at it from the driver's perspective. That they have someone to talk to, someone that will back them up."
That means choosing dispatchers for communication skills and temperament, not just operational experience, and giving them the tools and authority to actually support drivers in the moment.
Small moments matter disproportionately here. A driver who gets a genuine check-in after a difficult incident, rather than a call asking when they'll be back, carries that experience with them. So does the reverse.
5. Promote Depot Leaders Who Build Community
Everything above is filtered through the person running the depot. Chris was direct: the best-performing depots in New York weren't the best-resourced ones. They were the ones with the strongest sense of community. "The operators felt like they were coming to a place that was essentially their second home."
Paulo sees the same dynamic from the driver's side. His advice to managers is simple but hard to manufacture: "If you start looking at the group of people working with you as family, they will feel it too, and they will feel supported." That quality, the genuine willingness to invest in the people around you, is what separates depots that retain from depots that churn, and it can't be faked.
The practical takeaway for agency leaders is about promotion criteria. The qualities that make someone a good depot manager such as the ability to build belonging, to make drivers feel seen, to foster genuine team cohesion, are different from the qualities that make someone a strong operator or a capable supervisor.
Agencies that promote primarily on seniority or technical skill will get technically competent depot managers. Agencies that explicitly select for community-building will get depots that retain people.
The Conditions To Act Are Better Than They've Ever Been
The most encouraging signal from our survey is this: 93% of veteran drivers with 15 or more years on the job say they want technology to help them do their work better. This is not a workforce resisting change or waiting to be convinced. It's a workforce that's already leaning forward and that sees a better version of this job and wants to get there.
Waiching, who has spent 15 years working across every layer of the transit industry - starting as a six-year-old in her father's Hong Kong MTR station - sees this same openness in the agencies she works with every day: "It's really beautiful to watch everyone embrace change, and know that there is a better future ahead when we work together."
The tools exist. The data is clear. And crucially, the people doing this job every day are ready. For agency leaders, that's the best possible starting point, and there's never been a better moment to act on it.
Watch the full webinar recording or download our industry report for more.
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