Op-Ed: Who should run your transit agency?

Before you read any further, I'm going to ask you to check your ego at the door, take off your shoes and relax. Some of you will say "no way," bolt for the exit and decide this isn't worth your time. Others may think I've finally lost my mind and come up with a few choice phrases that probably shouldn't be printed here.  

Before you decide this isn't for you, I'd ask one thing: give it time to sink in. Read the entire piece. I'm not claiming I'm right. I am claiming that in an industry built on motion, coordination and timing, we've been remarkably slow to question some of our most basic assumptions. 

In the transit industry, not much has changed since we hooked a horse to a railcar and started carrying passengers. We still build schedules. We still hire operators to run vehicles according to those schedules. We still try to balance passenger needs, operator well-being and budgets that never seem to stretch far enough. Technology has evolved, propulsion has changed and data is everywhere—but the core mechanics of how transit actually works remain strikingly familiar. 

What hasn't changed much, either, are our organizational charts. If you move from agency to agency, there may be nuances, but the structure is largely the same. Scheduling always reports to someone—operations, planning, finance or another department—each with its own priorities and pressures. I could make the case for why every one of those departments uses schedules to achieve outcomes that make sense from their perspective. That's not a moral judgment; it's organizational gravity. 

Now take a sip of whatever drink you've got nearby, because here's the uncomfortable part: I believe the scheduling team should lead the operation. Please stay with me for a moment. 

By lead, I don't mean replacing executives, eliminating departments or staging an organizational coup. I mean positioning scheduling as the integrating authority—the place where operational reality, budget constraints, workforce capacity, maintenance needsand service design are reconciled before problems spill into crisis mode. 

Schedulers think differently by necessity. The job requires holding multiple, often competing, inputs in mind at the same time: time, space, labor rules, equipment, passenger demand, recovery and downstream consequences—including the lived realities of operators who must make the service work every day. Decisions made in scheduling echo throughout the system, sometimes weeks or months later. This kind of work demands big-picture thinking, multi-layered reasoning and the ability to anticipate second- and third-order effects—not in isolation, but continuously. 

This isn't about blame. Every department in a transit agency responds rationally to the incentives it's given. The problem is that those incentives are often misaligned, and schedules are where that misalignment first becomes visible—usually after it's already causing stress for operators, passengers and the system as a whole. 

Spoiler alert: This line of thinking leads to a provocative conclusion—that operations, planning, finance, human resources and maintenance should be aligned through the schedules function. I'm realistic enough to know that those in power rarely relinquish it voluntarily. But if an agency truly wants efficiency, resilience and credibility, it's worth at least considering what happens when schedules stop being a downstream product and start being the spine of the organization. 

What follows is a deliberately uncomfortable thought experiment examined department by department. You don't have to agree with it. Debate is healthy. but if even one agency is willing to engage with the idea honestly, we might find ourselves rebooting not just a system, but our industry itself, rather than endlessly patching what no longer fits. 

Operations 

Operations is where the service meets the street, and for that reason, it carries enormous influence within a transit agency. When something goes wrong—late trips, missed connections, angry passengers—operations feels it first. That immediacy creates understandable pressure to fix problems now; not at the next signup, not after the next analysis, but immediately. 

That pressure is also where trouble begins. 

When scheduling reports into operations, short-term fixes are often prioritized over long-term stability. The question becomes not if this is sustainable, but can we get today's service out the door?  

Running time is stretched or compressed without full consideration of downstream effects. Recovery is borrowed from future trips. Extra work is patched together to fill gaps that schedules were never designed to absorb. The system may survive the day—but it does so by accumulating stress. 

Operations does not lack expertise. What it often lacks is a time horizon. Schedules, by contrast, are built around consequences that unfold across weeks, months and signups. When operations controls scheduling authority, the temptation is to treat schedules as adjustable levers rather than structural commitments. The result is a cycle of intervention that masks underlying problems while quietly eroding reliability. 

On-time performance (OTP) is a clear example. When OTP becomes an operational imperative rather than a diagnostic indicator, schedules are pressured to support the metric rather than the service. Late trips are covered by pulling vehicles that were scheduled for maintenance. Operators are rerouted or short-turned to protect numbers. From a distance, performance appears to improve. Up close, the system is cannibalizing itself. 

This is not a critique of operations personnel. It is a recognition of misaligned incentives. Operations is rewarded for immediate stabilization; schedules are responsible for coherence across weeks, months and signups. When those roles are inverted, the organization loses its ability to distinguish between a temporary fix and a structural solution. 

If schedules lead, operations gain something it rarely has: guardrails. Clear, defensible running times. Defined recovery that isn't silently repurposed. A framework that distinguishes between exceptions and patterns. Operations can still respond to real-time conditions—but within a structure designed to absorb variability rather than deny it. 

The goal isn't to weaken operations. It's to free it from being the last line of defense against decisions made without full system visibility. When schedules lead, operations can do what it does best: manage service delivery without being forced to mortgage the future to survive the present. 

Finance 

Finance is often described as the rational counterweight inside a transit agency—the department that brings discipline, constraint and realism to every proposal. Budgets are finite. Labor is expensive. Vehicles, fuel, facilities and benefits all cost money, whether or not service runs. None of that is in dispute. 

The problem arises when financial authority is exercised without full visibility into how work is actually produced. 

When schedules report into finance, efficiency is often defined narrowly: fewer hours, tighter blocks, reduced recovery and maximum utilization of labor and equipment. On paper, this looks responsible. In practice, it frequently shifts the cost rather than reducing it. Stress migrates downstream into absenteeism, overtime, missed service and deferred maintenance—none of which disappear simply because they no longer sit neatly in a spreadsheet. 

Schedulers understand something that budgets alone cannot show: where inefficiency is being held in reserve. That reserve isn't waste; it's resilience—the margin that allows service to absorb variability without breaking. 

There is also a timing problem. Finance decisions are often made on fiscal calendars while schedules operate on operational ones. A schedule tightened to meet a short-term financial target may take months to unwind, even after its consequences are clear. By the time the cost shows up elsewhere, the original decision has already been justified and institutionalized. 

When schedules lead, finance gains a more accurate lens. Cost discussions are grounded in how service is actually delivered, not how it is assumed to work. Trade-offs become explicit: what is gained, what is lost and where the pressure will surface if margins are removed. Budget discipline doesn't disappear—it becomes informed. 

This alignment also protects finance from false savings. Reducing scheduled time without reducing required work doesn't eliminate cost; it redistributes it. Schedules are where that redistribution becomes visible early enough to intervene intelligently. 

Finance plays a vital role in any transit agency. However, without schedules in a leading position, financial decisions risk optimizing the wrong variables—quietly trading stability for short-term appearance. When schedules lead, finance isn't weakened. It's finally given the full picture it needs to govern responsibly. 

Human resources 

Human resources is responsible for one of the most consequential questions in transit, even if it's rarely framed that way: Do we actually have enough people to do the work we've scheduled? Not enough to survive today—but enough to operate reliably over time? 

When scheduling authority sits outside human resources, that question is often answered indirectly through headcount targets, attrition assumptions and historical ratios that may no longer reflect reality. Hiring plans are built around budgeted positions rather than scheduled work. Vacancies are treated as temporary gaps rather than as structural signals. The result is a workforce that is perpetually almost sufficient, yet never quite whole. 

Schedules tell a different story. Once runs are defined—once straight work, split work, extra board requirements, relief points and days off are known—the number of employees required is no longer an estimate. It's a calculation. That calculation must account not only for planned work, but for the realities of daily sick call-offs, longer-term absences that remove employees from service for extended periods and the churn created when uncovered work today reappears tomorrow as premium work for someone else. These are not edge cases; they are predictable features of transit operations, and schedules are where their cumulative impact can be understood and planned for rather than absorbed reactively. 

How many people are needed to cover the work, absorb variability, honor contractual rest and allow for vacations—while accounting for predictable absences—without destabilizing service is not a matter of opinion. It's math, grounded in operations. 

When human resources operates downstream of scheduling, staffing problems surface late, often as crises—such as overtime spikes. Absenteeism rises. Service reductions are framed as unavoidable. Recruitment accelerates reactively, chasing a moving target. None of this reflects a failure of human resources; it reflects a lack of early visibility. 

If schedules lead, human resources gains predictability. Hiring can be aligned to the actual workload rather than assumptions. Vacation slots can be managed deliberately instead of generously until shortages appear. Training pipelines can be sized to future needs, not yesterday's vacancies. Workforce planning becomes proactive rather than apologetic. 

Human resources plays a critical role in workforce health, equity and retention, but those goals are undermined when staffing decisions are made without full awareness of how service is constructed. When schedules lead, human resources isn't reduced to backfilling gaps. It becomes a strategic partner in building a workforce capable of delivering the agency's promised service. 

Maintenance 

Maintenance is often treated as a downstream function—essential, but reactive. Vehicles are expected to be ready when service needs them. When they aren't, the assumption is that maintenance will "catch up." In reality, maintenance is one of the clearest mirrors of how well an agency aligns planning, scheduling and operations. When the scheduling authority sits outside the maintenance conversation, the system begins to borrow against itself. 

Schedules determine how many vehicles are required, when they are required and how intensely they are used. Those decisions directly shape maintenance workload, inspection cycles and staffing needs. When service is expanded without corresponding adjustments to fleet availability or maintenance capacity, the pressure does not disappear—it accumulates quietly until something gives. 

That pressure often surfaces in familiar ways. Vehicles scheduled for preventive maintenance are pulled back into service to protect on-time performance or cover late trips. From a reporting standpoint, the day may appear successful. From a systems standpoint, the agency has traded tomorrow's reliability for today's appearance. Maintenance staff are left waiting for vehicles that never arrive, work is deferred and the backlog grows—largely invisible until failures become unavoidable. 

This is not a failure of maintenance. It is a failure of alignment. 

Maintenance operates on lead times that cannot be compressed on demand. Parts must be ordered. Vehicles must be cycled. Skilled technicians must be scheduled and retained. None of this responds well to last-minute service decisions made without full system awareness. When maintenance is forced into a constant state of reaction, the agency loses its ability to distinguish between an operational exception and a structural shortage. 

If schedules lead, maintenance gains a stable planning horizon. Fleet requirements are defined clearly and early. Service changes are evaluated not just for vehicle count, but for maintenance impact: inspection intervals, spare ratios, shop capacity and staffing levels. Decisions about expanding service or reallocating vehicles become deliberate choices rather than emergency responses. 

Maintenance is not merely a support function. It is a core operational partner whose constraints are just as real as labor rules or budgets. When schedules lead, maintenance is no longer asked to absorb the consequences of decisions made elsewhere. Instead, it becomes part of a coordinated system designed to keep vehicles—and the agency—moving sustainably. 

Planning 

Planning is where transit agencies imagine the future—and where good ideas most often fail because they are disconnected from the systems required to make them real. 

Planners are not the problem. In fact, strong planning is essential. Long-range vision, corridor analysis, land-use coordination and service concepts are what keep transit relevant in a changing world. The failure occurs when planning is treated as complete once it has been approved, rather than once it has been operationalized. 

Too often, planning decisions move forward without meaningful integration with schedules. Concepts are developed, presented and endorsed before the implications for running time, fleet requirements, labor, recovery or maintenance capacity are fully understood. When conflicts emerge—as they inevitably do—the instruction that follows is familiar: "Make it work." 

That phrase marks the point where misalignment becomes institutionalized. 

Schedules are asked to absorb decisions made elsewhere, frequently under constraints that cannot be reconciled without additional vehicles, more time or increased staffing. When those resources are unavailable, the schedule does not fail loudly. It fails quietly—through compressed running times, fragile recovery, stressed operators and service that looks acceptable on paper but degrades on the street. 

This is not a critique of planning ambition. It is a critique of the planning sequence. 

If schedules lead, planning becomes stronger, not weaker. Ideas are tested early against operational reality. Trade-offs are surfaced before commitments are made. Short-range plans benefit from a realistic time horizon, and long-range visions are grounded in how service is actually delivered. Planning remains visionary—but it also becomes executable. 

The most successful planning efforts I have seen were those where schedulers were engaged early and continuously, not as validators at the end, but as partners throughout. When that happens, the question shifts from can this be approved to can this be sustained? That is the difference between a plan that looks good and one that works. 

Planning sets direction. Schedules determine feasibility. When those roles are aligned in the right order, transit agencies stop asking their systems to perform miracles and start building services that can endure. 

Customer service and marketing 

Customer service and marketing sit at the public edge of a transit agency. They translate schedules into information and absorb the consequences when that information doesn't match reality. They are often blamed for problems they did not create and cannot correct. 

One recurring issue is the artificial freezing of schedules. In many agencies, the cutoff for schedule development is driven not by operational readiness, but by printing deadlines, marketing calendars or legacy distribution processes. Known issues are left unresolved because the schedule has already gone to print. What follows is a familiar cycle: Operators work around flawed assumptions, customers experience unreliable service and customer service is left to manage frustration without the authority to address root causes. 

This disconnect turns schedules into artifacts rather than living tools. Marketing promotes what has been published. Customer service explains what went wrong. Neither has meaningful influence over how the service is actually constructed. 

If schedules lead, this dynamic changes. Customer feedback becomes an early-warning system rather than a postmortem. Marketing timelines adapt to operational reality instead of dictating it. Printed materials and digital tools reflect service that has been validated, not merely finalized. The goal is not perfection, but alignment—so that what is promised, what is operated and what is experienced are no longer at odds. 

Customer service and marketing do not need to control schedules, but when schedules lead, these functions gain something they rarely have: the ability to participate meaningfully in improving the service they are asked to explain. 

Conclusion 

Transit agencies are complex systems, not collections of silos. When authority is fragmented, misalignment becomes inevitable—and the costs are paid by operators, passengers and the public trust. 

This is not a call to diminish operations, finance, human resources, maintenance, planning, customer service or marketing. It is a call to recognize where integration must live. Schedules sit at the intersection of time, labor, equipment, money and human reality. That role is structural, not abstract. 

When schedules lead, decisions become connected before they become irreversible. Trade-offs are made deliberately instead of reactively. Metrics regain meaning and the organization gains something increasingly rare: coherence.  

To make this a realistic function of any agency, the schedules function should publish a rolling five-year service and scheduling outlook—updated annually and accessible across the agency. Departments should be able to submit changes, constraints and emerging needs throughout the year, so the schedules function can incorporate those inputs into a controlled, transparent plan. The result is fewer surprises, fewer silo-driven decisions and a shared operating picture that keeps service, staffing, maintenance and budgets aligned. 

You don't have to agree with this argument to engage with it. However, if the way things have always been done is no longer delivering reliable service, stable work or sustainable growth, then it's worth asking a different question. 

Not who should be in charge—but what must be integrated for transit to work. 

Let’s start there.