An Observation on Toronto's Transit.

The Right People Need to Be Involved.

I personally reflect sometimes on the fact that despite spending so much of my time thinking about public transportation in Toronto, and having spent years of my career making money talking about public transportation in Toronto, I’ve only spent a small fraction of that time actually working directly on public transport in Toronto, and when I did as part of a consultancy as opposed to a transit authority. That’s weird!

A Bright Spot, Pleasant New Buses.

This makes me a bit uncomfortable — if you’re familiar with the discourse around transit costs and state capacity, you’ll know that consultants are kind of the bad guys, but the thing is, that’s where the jobs are. I didn’t get a job offer from a transit authority, and like many others, my preference for working directly for one is irrelevant.

There are obviously commentators in all kinds of areas of the world, many of whom form businesses around their commentary, and yet that’s something you usually see in large, highly-profitable industries, public transit is not finance. I can’t help but notice that in another area of passion — technology — there seems to be a lot more overlap, and people travelling between the technology firms themselves, and places that spend time thinking about them.

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This all makes sense intuitively: if you as an ability can evaluate something, then you can go work at an organization responsible for delivering that thing and try to improve things from within the tent so that when someone else evaluates the outcome is better.

Now, none of this is to say I haven’t had some interesting conversations, but the proof is in the pudding, and I’m on the outside. I remember frequently remarking to people that despite enjoying work as a consultant to transit agencies that I felt I had a lot more power to create change … making YouTube videos.

I guess this is a long-winded way of saying it’s s tad weird that I haven’t been poached by a transit agency, and while that’s a bit ego inflating for myself, I know a lot of people in and around Toronto public transit who clearly know a ton and care a ton, and most of them don’t actually work on the stuff, or they did and no longer do. This says a lot!

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Something that’s also weird is that even after weeks of problems and political crisis around the Finch West LRT, as I’m writing this today (December 26th — Boxing Day in Canada), a big chunk of the Finch Light Rail (sometimes the whole line) was shut down due to a snowstorm … in Canada.

Now, naturally someone out there will make an excuse “it’s a new system and the snow is pretty bad!”, but I know enough about transit to feel like this just fits the pattern we see in Toronto of the transit just not working. Higher performance in snow should be an obvious benefit of rail-based transit anyways!

People kind of look down on the element of transit people literally liking trains, but part of how I know that rail based vehicles should perform well in snow is that my childhood German garden trains were literally designed to be used in the snow! If a garden train can do it, a giant actual train should be able to handle a lot!

So, you can make excuses, but ultimately I think it’s hard to say this is not all just downstream of the culture around public transport management in the Toronto region. I think its helpful to think about it in terms of the counterfactual that this was the roads where there were constantly uber-low speed restrictions and you just couldn’t drive on them properly 10% of the time. Heads. Would. Roll. I’ve personally never talked to any of the current transit executives, and thats fine, but isn’t it a bit weird to have someone making videos on all your projects and never actually talking to that person?

Sometimes when I tell people (somewhat jokingly) that I muse about moving far away to a rural or exurban place where I don’t have to be frustrated with the state of public transport (my dreams of moving to Sweden, Norway, Switzerland or something remain unfulfilled), they say I need to stay here to “fix things”. And ultimately while I might be able to do slightly more as a creator than as a junior person at a consulting firm, it really is out elected officials and transit executives who wield the power here.

One of the most fundamental is Expertise we hear a lot about this all the time, and it is an important matter, but I don’t think its that important in Toronto. Let me explain. I was recently talking with someone important and they mentioned how our transit agencies lack expertise, and I said at the time (and want to reemphasize now) that this is not wrong. Toronto literally does not have enough expertise from planning, to engineering, to construction, but I don’t really think this is the main problem here.

Instead, what I see, and what I told this person is that the issue is more organizational, there are a lot of good people who know a lot about transit in Toronto — people like Dr. Jonathan English, Jedwin Mok, Narayan Donaldson, Steve Munro, and even “JRUrbaneNetwork” a former TTC engineer now based in China who wrote a kind of odyssey-like transit saga of the city over the last three decades that most cities can only dream of having written about them:

The Toronto Tragedy

But, none of these people work for transit authorities in Toronto, thats not good! Imagine you have a big project, what version of an ideal scenario where you complete that project well doesn’t involve the most passionate interlocutors of the space that project exists in being part of the team that comes up with solutions to it?

Something I’ve heard historically is that these type of people just don’t want to be in the agencies and the like, but thats obviously a half truth — many have just been driven away. Some of these people have worked at the agencies, instead I’d ask why it is that we have public institutions and organizations that seem to satisfied with not having their most passionate supporters in the tent? Why are these people getting excluded? All of them spend free time doing what amounts to free reporting and consulting work for the benefit of the region, and yet . . .

So while expertise clearly isn’t as broadly available as we’d like, perhaps the bigger problem is that people with expertise or passion are driven out. Just look at what happened with DB on GO Expansion. A sort of running theory I have is that in North America a lot of these passionate technocratic transport people just turn into roads people, and we do have some really impressive roads to show for it, the issue is that roads are not high capacity or good for society in the ways transit is — but people who want to solve these problems and who don’t have options take what they can get.

Seriously, consider that we wouldn’t accept roads that just don’t work and make traffic much slower upon opening, and then the fact that we also don’t have a contingent of people writing Op-Eds on how to make the road system dramatically more efficiently for cars in line with international best practice — on road design (again for cars) Ontario pretty much is best practice. Meanwhile, I think we could absolutely double transit ridership with the same resources used more thoughtfully, it probably wouldn’t even be that hard.

So ultimately, I think the biggest leadership problem we have is getting passionate, knowledgeable people, who are ok with, and perhaps even relish in not always being the most knowledgeable person in the room. The type of people that would suggest we stop showing up to American public transit events as the best of the best, and start going to international conferences where we’d look less good, but learn and improve far more. We need to stop being satisfied with organizations that simply have all the standard organizational stuff, instead we should be looking for ones that don’t drive out (or drive made) those who are willing to work nights and weekends on this stuff because they love it. (That people will do this for public transport is a wildly under appreciated asset.)We need a culture and leadership that can get the right people into the right places, and honestly what’s amusing to me is that while I have no real managerial expertise, or expertise as a transit executive, I actually think I could do that specifically quite well!