Zūm, the Leader in Modern Student Transportation, Receives Fast Company’s 2023 Innovation by Design Award
Zūm, the Leader in Modern Student Transportation, Receives Fast Company’s 2023 Innovation by Design Award
Other 2023 honorees include nearly 500 projects from Adobe, PepsiCo, Canva, and others
REDWOOD CITY, Calif., August 22, 2023 – Zūm, the leader in modern student transportation, today was honored in Fast Company’s Innovation by Design Awards for 2023 in the Transportation category.
The Innovation by Design Awards, which can be found in the September 2023 issue of Fast Company, honor the designers and businesses solving the most crucial problems of today and anticipating the pressing issues of tomorrow. The competition, now in its 12th year, features a range of blue-chip companies, emerging startups, and hungry young talents.
Zūm is leading the charge to make student transportation safe, reliable, sustainable, and equitable by providing connectivity and transparency to parents, students, drivers, and administrators. Its cloud-based platform and multi-sized fleets optimize routes, reduce commute times, track children’s arrival and departure from school, and provide cost savings for school districts nationwide.
Zūm currently serves thousands of schools, including in: Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest school district; Oakland; San Francisco; Seattle; Spokane; San Bernardino; Howard County; Nashville; and more. Learn more about how Zūm is bringing innovation to transportation at www.parent-experience.ridezum.com.
“We are honored to be included in Fast Company’s Innovation by Design Awards, which spotlight some of the most inventive and exciting projects and services that are helping to create a better world,” said Ritu Narayan, CEO and Founder of Zūm. “I started Zūm with a mission to modernize the student transportation system and improve the yellow school bus experience for children, parents, drivers, and school administrators. We are grateful to our partners for sharing this vision and are proud of the transformational results we have achieved in school districts nationwide.”
“So much innovation news these days is focused on AI,” said Brendan Vaughan, editor-in-chief of Fast Company. “This year’s Innovation by Design honorees are a reminder that it’s human ingenuity that drives invention.”
The judges include renowned designers from a variety of disciplines, business leaders from some of the most innovative companies in the world, and Fast Company’s own writers and editors. Entries are judged on the key ingredients of innovation: functionality, originality, beauty, sustainability, user insight, cultural impact, and business impact.
Winners, finalists, and honorable mentions are featured online, and winners and finalists are featured in the issue of Fast Company magazine, on newsstands August 29, 2023.
Zūm received an honorable mention for “Redesigning the Yellow School Bus Experience.” Features of Zūm’s newly designed Parent App include:
- Transparency – Through the cloud-based app, Parents now know the exact bus, bus driver and location of their child’s school bus, which they can track in real time. The Parent App also provides an ETA while the bus is en route.
- Safety and Peace of Mind – RFID-enabled bus cards provide real-time pickup or dropoff notifications and remove the concern that a child might get on the wrong bus route or get off at the wrong stop. Delays and early arrivals are clearly communicated – so, for example, if a bus is arriving early, the app will message parents to let them know the driver will wait at the stop until the original scheduled dropoff time.
- Convenience and Simplicity – Zūm’s users, just like the school districts we serve, are very diverse, not necessarily tech-savvy, and English for many is not their first language. As a result, providing information in the most accessible way, both verbally and visually, is essential to the Parent App experience.
To see the complete list of Innovation by Design Awards honorees, go to https://www.fastcompany.com/innovation-by-design/list.
About Fast Company
Fast Company is the only media brand fully dedicated to the vital intersection of business, innovation, and design, engaging the most influential leaders, companies, and thinkers on the future of business. Headquartered in New York City, Fast Company is published by Mansueto Ventures LLC, along with our sister publication Inc., and can be found online at www.fastcompany.com.
About Zūm
Zum has reimagined student transportation, the nation’s largest mass transit system. Our robust operations and integrated end-to-end cloud-based platform provides a modern student transportation service for school districts purpose-built around the needs of kids and the expectations of their families. Zum provides one seamless, real-time interface for parents, drivers, schools, districts, administrators, and operators to transport children safely and with increased visibility and personalized care. Always investing in the wellbeing of communities, Zum is also the only carbon neutral student transportation provider in the nation with plans to go Net Zero with EV transition. Zum is available nationwide, serving more than 4,000 schools across the U.S. Learn more at www.ridezum.com.
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