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CASE STUDY

Ottawa Student Transportation

Progressive Web Application – Bus alerts and notifications serving 30K+ residents in the Ottawa area.

A smartphone screen displays OSTA updates: transport may be delayed due to weather, one service is cancelled, and another is delayed by 10 minutes.

Ottawa student transportation: Real-time bus notifications

Keeping students moving

When the Ottawa Student Transportation Authority (OSTA) needed a faster, more reliable way to keep families informed of bus delays and cancellations, they turned to Snap 360 for a seamless mobile app to keep parents, students, and staff updated instantly —no matter the weather.

Goals

Deliver a web-based Progressive Web Application (PWA) that provides parents and students with secure, real-time notifications of school bus delays and cancellations.

Behind every school day lies a complex transportation network moving thousands of students safely across the city. Weather, traffic, and mechanical issues can disrupt this system in an instant. To keep families informed and minimize stress, timely access to cancellation and delay alerts is essential.

Challenges

Extreme load variability

Traffic spikes of 10-20x normal volume during snow days and severe
weather events.

Cross-platform complexity

Maintaining separate native apps for Android and iOS was costly and
resource-intensive.

Budget constraints

Limited IT budget requiring maximum cost efficiency.

Time-critical communications

Parents and students needed immediate, reliable notifications about
transportation disruptions.

Solution.

Progressive web app (PWA)

Snap 360 developed a PWA app to deliver native-like experiences on both Android and iOS devices from one codebase.

Its offline-first design keeps notifications available even in areas of poor connectivity.

Parents and students enjoy features like push notifications, home screen installation, background sync, and a mobile-optimized responsive layout.

Serverless infrastructure

Smooth runnings on a fast, reliable, and cost-effective serverless architecture.

Cloudflare Workers handle API requests and business logic with global distribution for consistent performance at scale.

By leveraging Cloudflare’s global edge network, the system consistently achieves sub-100ms response times, providing families with quick access to transportation updates.

A smartphone screen displays a notification settings page for school bus run alerts and school alerts, with options to select a school and bus route.

Key technical features

Built on a serverless foundation, the platform scales effortlessly to handle traffic spikes ranging from hundreds to over 30,000 concurrent users during nasty weather.

A global Content Delivery Network (CDN) caches static assets at nearby edge locations for consistently fast delivery.

Even under extreme demand, fallback systems keep the platform available to ensure essential notifications reach their audience.

Implementation results.

Performance Metrics

  • 99.9% uptime during critical snow day events
  • <200ms average response time for notification delivery
  • Zero infrastructure management required post-deploymenT
  • Seamless scaling from baseline 500 daily users to 30,000+ during weather emergencies

Cost Efficiency

  • Minimal operational costs – dramatic cost reduction vs. traditional solutions
  • No additional scaling costs during traffic spikes
  • Eliminated native app development/maintenance costs

User Experience Improvements

  • Single installation works across all modern devices
  • Instant notifications delivered within seconds of posting
  • No app store dependencies for updates or distribution

Tech Stack

  • Frontend: Vue.js PWA with service workers
  • Backend: Cloudflare Workers + D1 database + Queues
  • Hosting: Cloudflare Pages

Wrapping things up.

Tangible benefits

Now serving tens of thousands of Ottawa parents and students, this app delivers real-time bus delay and cancellation alerts, day in, day out, with the reliability families depend on.

For the Ottawa Student Transportation Authority, this solution eliminates the cost and complexity of maintaining separate native apps while delivering exceptional user experiences.

Conclusion

By scaling up during snow days, while maintaining low operational costs on quiet days, the system is both cost-efficient and dependable.

Enterprise-grade architecture developed by Snap 360 ensures 99.9% uptime. Parents are always up to date, even during the most demanding weather events.

Mid Tier iOS/Android Apps average cost is $100K.
It doesnt have to be this way.

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