A top Boston Public Schools transportation official apologized for the widespread bus delays that marred the beginning of the school year, but the gesture didn’t stop city councilors and parents from hammering the beleaguered district.

Daniel Rosengard, executive director of transportation, pinned the blame on kinks that were being worked out with the district’s new Zum technology. The GPS and bus tracker app, while intended to improve on-time bus performance over the long-term, led to a “larger dip” in performance than expected to kick off the school year, when it was used in real-world conditions for the first time, he said.

“This had a very significant and negative impact on students, families and schools across Boston, as many buses saw significant delays, particularly at the start of the school year,” Rosengard said at a Thursday City Council hearing. “For that, I deeply apologize. Our team has been working with urgency to address the issues we saw at the start of the school year and make rapid improvements.”

Just a third of BPS buses showed up on time to get kids to class on the first day of school, far below the state-mandated 95% on-time performance mark. The bus delays, ranging from as high as to 30 minutes to several hours, per city councilors and parents who spoke at the day’s hearing, left parents scrambling to provide or find alternative transportation options.

The problem has not been confined to morning drop off and afternoon pickup, councilors said, but has impacted student-athletes as well, with BPS sports teams left stranded at times without district transportation to their games or practices.

“It’s simply unacceptable for our students, students with disabilities, and their parents and caretakers to wait over 30 minutes for school buses to pick up and drop off,” Councilor Ed Flynn, who co-sponsored the day’s hearing, said. “Our student-athletes and coaches also should not have to find out that buses are not coming at the last minute and scramble to make other plans.”

“We cannot normalize this disruption,” Flynn added.

Rosengard said on-time performance, while “significantly below” what was seen last year during the first week of school in the morning and afternoon, improved to about 90% in the morning in October. That figure was about two percentage points higher than what was seen during the month of October last school year, he said.

BPS officials also attributed the earlier delays to bus drivers familiarizing themselves with new routes, two-thirds of which were changed this school year. The difficulty in navigating Boston roads, traffic and construction were also cited, along with an older bus fleet as the district moves towards electrification.

The district data reflecting improvements presented a stark contrast to the challenges members of the public are still experiencing, per testimony provided by community members and feedback councilors said they’ve been hearing.

“One parent told me the other day that the bus comes when it wants to, but my boss doesn’t let me show up to work when I want to,” Councilor Erin Murphy, another co-sponsor, said. “They can no longer put their child on the bus because they can’t rely on it, but it’s costing them a lot of stress and money to try to find other ways, and many times, missing school.”

Councilor Liz Breadon said Brighton High School has “given up” on having a bus available on a daily basis for its football team, with players instead opting to walk two miles to the field for practice each day.

“We’re paying $173 million for school transportation and this is what we’ve got,” Breadon said. “This is not a good bargain.”

Chris Wholey, a Beacon Hill father of two girls in kindergarten and second grade, said that over the past two years, “there have been about 20 instances where either the morning or afternoon bus has failed to show up at all.”

“This year’s issues feel fundamentally worse,” Wholey said. “The bus did not show up on the first day of school, which represents our daughter’s first day of kindergarten and feels beyond unconscionable to me.”

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The arrival times, he said, have been “deplorable,” with the morning bus arriving at school after the bell about 75% of the time. His children attend Warren-Prescott School in Charlestown, where he said afternoon delays have left the bus arriving at their bus stop late “100%” of the time this year.

Zum app failures, Wholey said, have also made it difficult to track the morning bus ride, making it difficult to know how often his daughters arrive late at school.

“What makes this further inflammatory is that we have no BPS school in Beacon Hill,” Wholey said. “Our only option is to bus our children to another part of the city and at present, subject them to this very, very disappointing transportation system. Our children deserve far better than this.”

Flynn questioned BPS officials about the disconnect from what the public was saying about the persistent transportation challenges and the district’s testimony that the system is improving.

Rosengard acknowledged the disconnect, saying that even at 95% on-time performance mandated by the state, 1,000 students would still be arriving late to school each day. At the current 92% rate, 2,000 students are late on a daily basis, he said.

“What we’re still hearing from too many families is this is not working for me, because it’s not — because there are still so many families that are out there who are having a late bus every single day,” Rosengard said. “That’s why we did feel the need to do something dramatic, make a system-wide change this year, because we’ve been stuck at 90(%) for years now, and that’s not good enough.”