The Most Important Commute
Why the school bus gives our kids anxiety and how to stop it.
“Zum CMX just brought the whole overall operation and experience to a whole new level”
About the book
The Most Important Commute is the story of what Zūm's founders learned after talking to hundreds of parents, drivers, dispatchers, and superintendents about what's actually broken — and what a transportation system built around people, not just buses, can look like. Drawing on real district transformations in Kansas City, Oakland, Fresno, and San Francisco, the book makes the case that student mobility isn't a logistics problem. It's an education problem, and it's solvable.
Praise for Zum CMX
Meet the authors
Ritu Narayan
Co-Founder & CEO
An engineer by training and product leader by craft, Ritu spent two decades at eBay, Yahoo, Oracle, and IBM before founding Zūm — driven by watching her own mother leave her career a generation earlier because of the same morning transportation strain Ritu later faced herself. She holds a B.E. from Delhi Institute of Technology and an M.S. from Stanford GSB.
Vivek Garg
Co-Founder & COO
A former Major in the Indian Army with 11 years of service, Vivek led operations at Safexpress, one of India's largest logistics companies, before co-founding Zūm. He holds a B.Sc. from the National Defence Academy of India and an M.S. from Stanford GSB.
Abhishek Garg
Co-Founder & CTO
Before Zūm, Abhishek worked as a computational biologist at the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research and a postdoctoral fellow in Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. He holds a B.E. in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Information Technology and a Ph.D. from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.
