He spent six years designing websites for American Express. Then he went back to school to make buses faster - and he is still at it.
Chief Business Officer, TransitAt Transit - the multimodal app riders open to plan, track, and pay for a trip across buses, trains, bikes, and scooters - David Block-Schachter runs the business side. As Chief Business Officer he leads the team that builds partnerships with transit agencies, and a research and analytics group that turns rider behavior into something cities can act on. The pitch he likes to make: Transit exists to make vehicles appear and to make mass transit feel good to use again.
His diagnosis of why transit so often disappoints is unsentimental. The problem, he says, is rarely the rider and rarely even the bus. It is the institution around it. Agencies get buried under their own internal requirements - what a system must do for procurement, for legacy vendors, for the org chart - and lose the thread of what the person standing at the stop in the rain actually needs. His whole career has been a series of attempts to put that person back at the center.
He has earned the right to the opinion. He has sat on every side of the table: the academic measuring the system, the startup founder trying to outflank it, the public-agency executive trying to reform it from inside, and now the vendor trying to make all of it work together. That full circuit is rare, and it is why agencies listen.
Running Mercedes Sprinter vans around Boston, his team went to add fare payment and ran into a number that reads like a parable: the box to collect the money cost more than the vehicle it bolted into. That is the gap between how transit is built and how it is used - and closing it has become his life's work.
His master's thesis was titled The Myth of the Single Mode Man - the idea that nobody is purely a driver or purely a rider.
His PhD dissertation, Hysteresis and Urban Rail, traced how Boston's old streetcar lines still shape how the city moves today.
He recruited engineers for the 100-year-old MBTA using a startup hiring website - an odd place for the nation's oldest transit system to fish.
His resume lists "meeting new friends, and hanging out in front of old trains" among recent accomplishments.
The first decade of David Block-Schachter's working life had nothing to do with buses. He was an interaction designer and information architect in New York, writing user-interface standards for IBM, leading projects for the American Express card divisions at Digitas, and working on accounts for Sharp, Nestle Purina, and Fujifilm. He built a website and a content-management system for the nonprofit Dress for Success, spanning 75 locations worldwide, listed on his resume under the title "Freelance Web Guru."
Then he changed lanes completely. He went to MIT and stacked up degrees in transportation and city planning - a Master of Science, a Master of City Planning, and a PhD - while a bachelor's in Urban Studies from Columbia, started years earlier, finally landed in 2006. The design training never left him. Where many transportation experts think in networks and throughput, he kept asking the interaction designer's question: what does this feel like for the person using it?
At MIT's Transit Research Program he supervised graduate students embedded inside the MBTA, studying how to fuse messy, real-time data into a single well-designed app that could change both how an agency operates and how riders behave. He researched everything from Boston's streetcar history to auto-ownership policy in China and Beijing's car-license lottery. The academic and the practitioner were already fused.
Interaction design and information architecture in NYC for American Express, IBM, Sharp, and others.
Supervised graduate research embedded at the MBTA, turning automatically-collected data into operational change.
Built dispatch tools and rider-perception surveys tied to real passenger movement.
Designed the routing brain of a pop-up bus network - the first VC-backed mass transit startup since the electric railways.
Built a startup-like customer-technology team inside the nation's oldest transit agency.
Leads agency partnerships and research & analytics for the multimodal app.
He led the team that built Bridj's proprietary system to plan and route vehicles on the fly from aggregated rider requests - intuition fused with optimization algorithms.
He conceived an account-based, open-payments fare system with privacy by design - built to speed buses up to 10% by getting cash off the vehicle.
He brokered the MBTA's first deal with Transit App - full rider-data access for the agency, better real-time info for riders - a template since copied across the country.
It would be easy to file David Block-Schachter as a true believer, and he is one - he writes "I still believe in changing the world" on a resume, lives without a car, and spends as much time as he can showing people how much better cities can be with great transit. But the believer comes with a spreadsheet. At the MBTA he consolidated the fare-collection department and cut its budget by more than a fifth while making it faster to fix problems. He brought test-driven development to a codebase that had no tests. He talks about regulation not as an obstacle but as a relationship you manage with good intentions.
That blend - missionary zeal plus operational discipline - is the rare thing. Plenty of people want transit to be better. Fewer can recruit forty engineers into a public agency, ship better bus predictions, and still keep the rider, not the org chart, at the center of every decision. His career is a long argument that the two are not in tension. The way you change the world is by getting the boring parts right.