Last week, more than 170,000 people from over 120 countries came together in Berlin for InnoTrans 2026. It's a remarkable sight: the entire public transport industry in one place, all working to make moving around our cities cleaner, easier, and more reliable. Among the speakers was Snapper Services CEO Miki Szikszai, who shares his reflections on the week below.
We believe excellent public transport is one of the most powerful forces we have to decongest and decarbonise our cities. InnoTrans was a reminder that this belief is widely shared. Our industry is also naturally collaborative, but collaboration only works when you know how you're really performing, who your true peers are, and where to focus to improve.
This transparency was the thread running through my talk in Berlin. Here are five lessons I took away, from the data we shared and the conversations it sparked.
The Global Public Transit Index (GPTI) from Mosaiq by Snapper Services covers more than 1,500 locations around the world, is updated daily, and is freely available to anyone. One of the most striking things it shows is that eight of the top 10 countries have populations around 10 million or fewer.
Scale and resources help, but they aren't what separates excellent networks from the rest. That should be encouraging for every operator and authority, whatever their size.
Finland stands out in the GPTI – first of 23 countries – not just because its network performs well, but because it performs well consistently. Passengers build their lives around a network they can rely on day after day. A great month is good news; a great year, every year, is what earns trust.
It's natural to benchmark against cities of a similar size or in the same country. But some of the most useful comparisons come from unexpected pairings. Stuttgart and Budapest differ in size and even in how they define "on time", yet placing them side by side quickly shows where one could learn from the other.
Take early departures. Around 14% of trips in Stuttgart leave early, compared with just 0.6% in Budapest. That's a clear opportunity for Stuttgart to learn from Budapest's approach if they want to improve this metric.
The GPTI makes it easier than ever to find these peers and start a conversation. Curiosity is the first step.
If the GPTI is about curiosity, our transit intelligence platform, Mosaiq Insights, is about understanding why. We designed Insights to be fast and easy to use, and with our new AI assistant we've made it easier still.
Most public transport teams don't have too little data. They have too much, and not enough time to find what it's telling them. Ask Mosaiq is an AI assistant built into Mosaiq Insights that closes that gap. You ask a question in plain language and get a specific answer, backed by interactive charts and, where relevant, context such as weather. Unlike general AI tools, every answer is grounded in your own network data, and the evidence is always on show.
Ask Mosaiq highlights what's worth a closer look, but it never decides for you. The judgement stays with the people who know the network best. To show what this looks like in practice, we used Ask Mosaiq live on stage on Budapest's network, one of the best performing in the world. We started with a simple question: which Centre for Budapest Transport (BKK) services are contributing most to poor performance?
Ask Mosaiq worked through the data quickly and systematically. It ruled out services with low-quality data, so we weren't chasing false signals, and identified the Route 14 tram as a prime opportunity to focus on. We then explored further, generating options that included an assessment of how the network coped when snow and ice hit in January 2026.
Even at the top of the index, there is room to improve. The trick is finding it quickly.
What makes this kind of analysis useful wasn't just that it took under 10 minutes. It was that every step of Ask Mosaiq's work was visible. The result wasn't a black box answer but a set of defensible options, backed by evidence, that you could question and explain to others.
And because we wanted to hypothetically share those options with a planner who doesn't speak English, we generated them in Hungarian. Good insight shouldn't stop at a language barrier.
Public transport professionals are some of the most dedicated people I know, and some of the most time-poor. Every hour spent wrangling data is an hour not spent improving services for passengers.
Putting Ask Mosaiq in their hands means better-quality decisions, made faster. Better decisions mean better public transport, and better public transport is how we decongest and decarbonise our cities.
Thank you to everyone who joined us in Berlin. If you missed it, you can access Mosaiq by Snapper Services for free. I'd love to hear what you discover about your network, and who you find to learn from.
Most public transport teams don't have too little data. They have too much data – and not enough time. They’re under pressure to hit service targets, secure funding and bids, and maintain their KPIs. It’s more important than ever not to waste valuable hours on manual analysis.
Snapper Services is adding a new layer of intelligence to the Mosaiq Transit Intelligence Suite. Ask Mosaiq is an AI assistant built into Mosaiq Insights that will surface defensible network insights – cutting down on the manual spreadsheet wrangling so you can exercise your expert judgement for better networks.
Ask Mosaiq is an intelligence layer that sits above your network data. Simply ask a question and it gives you a specific answer, backed by interactive charts and, where relevant, weather context.
Ask "What's the biggest performance issue on my network right now?" or "How has this route changed compared to last month?" and Ask Mosaiq answers directly. Evidence-backed answers are synthesised from your own secure Mosaiq data. For additional context, Ask Mosaiq can draw on third-party data, like weather information, to help you better understand your network performance. The assistant remembers your previous sessions too, so you're not starting from scratch every time you open a new chat.
We know that tools don't replace expert local knowledge. Ask Mosaiq doesn't decide anything on your behalf. It highlights what's worth a closer look in your network and shows its evidence, but the judgement, and any resulting decision, always stays with you.
Most transit teams aren't short on data anymore. Mosaiq Insights already ingests more than 12 billion bus vehicle positions each month. What planning and scheduling teams lack is time: time to find what your network data is actually telling you, so that you can defend your decisions and act with confidence.
That gap between your data and hard-won decisions is closed by hand today. Planners, schedulers, and performance analysts set up manual filters, save screenshots, and update fragile spreadsheets.
You might know there’s a problem but simply not be able to surface the evidence fast enough to resolve it before the team moves on to something new. You might have a repetitive runtime analysis you have to perform each year. You might want to simply know the biggest problem on your network, without having to eyeball every data point yourself. We know that public transport teams rely on spreadsheet-based reporting. We've written before about the burden of manual analysis – and it's a pain that shows up differently depending on your role.
A senior planner or performance lead needs a case that survives scrutiny from operators, unions, boards, and elected members. A planner at a small operator needs answers about network performance, but doesn’t have a dedicated analyst on staff. A Chief Operating Officer or director fields ad hoc questions from a councillor and needs an answer they can trust before they can defend it. General AI tools work from the world's data; none of them are grounded in your network, so none of them can answer any of this directly.
If you're a public transport authority, and particularly one operating under or preparing for a franchising contract, your performance is under scrutiny. Ask Mosaiq gives your planning and performance teams a direct route to the evidence you need.
Ask a question about operator performance, a route, or a stop, and Ask Mosaiq answers quickly with supporting evidence. Assess this week against last week, or this month against the same month last year. Period-over-period comparisons account for seasonality automatically, so a real decline in performance doesn't get mistaken for a routine seasonal dip, or lost among genuine ones. That same process extends to data quality, so you can track how completely your vehicle-location data is matching to scheduled trips over time, not just how punctual the buses were.
For contract compliance, committee papers, and an ad hoc question from a councillor, these are the insights you need to be confident.
"There's a clear opportunity to use this data to help generate our reliability reports – I think it'll be a game changer for us." – Damien Bannon, Belfast Area Manager at Translink NI
Operators under contract to authorities already answer to formal KPI consequences – claimable failures, weekly reviews. If you're an operator, Ask Mosaiq gives your planning team a faster route from question to answer: whether you’re bidding for a new contract, running a large, multi-route network, or employ a lean team with no dedicated analyst at all.
Ask in plain language and get an instant answer, with no spreadsheet wrangling and no Power BI expertise required. Ask Mosaiq runs an analysis, whether that's a network overview, a route deep-dive, a stop-level look at where performance is slipping, or a first look at where running times and peak vehicle requirements might have room to move, and answers you directly. For a planner run off their feet, that's the analytical depth previously only available to a dedicated data team.
These fast, evidence-backed insights also give operators a shared starting point for conversations with the authorities they report to, so discussions start from the same data rather than two different versions of what happened. With Ask Mosaiq findings, you’ll be both credible and confident in these high-stakes conversations.
Timetables have the potential to carry hidden slack: recovery time built in for delays that don't always happen, or running times set for road conditions that changed years ago. Finding that extra service capacity requires knowing where to look, and the time to go and look for it.
Ask Mosaiq surfaces that capacity directly. Ask where your running times could be adjusted, or where your peak vehicle requirement no longer matches what's scheduled, and Ask Mosaiq highlights where the slack in your timetable already sits.
Recovered minutes can drive better frequency and reliability, all without adding a vehicle or a driver to the roster.
"The methodology we'd have used to get that same, defensible result would have taken two or three days. With Ask Mosaiq, it took half a day." – Damien Bannon, Belfast Area Manager at Translink NI
Congested cities and towns need excellent public transport options. Better transport is good for people and the planet, and it depends on authorities and operators having the right data, analysis, and insight to build stronger networks and better passenger experiences.
Ask Mosaiq is how Snapper Services is working towards that: making the transit intelligence inside Mosaiq Insights accessible to everyone – not just the people trained as analysts. The organisations that close the distance between what their data is showing them and a decision-ready insight will be the ones running the best networks. Ask Mosaiq is built to help you get there, faster, and defend the decisions you make along the way.
"If we're using Ask Mosaiq, it'll surface those insights for us to act on. That's utopia for a bus operator – using data that updates dynamically to improve performance and the customer experience." – Damien Bannon, Belfast Area Manager at Translink NI
We want to make network improvements easy. There’s no procurement process and no paid pilot. Get free access to Mosaiq Insights and ask your first question today.
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