Had a meeting with the TTC recently pitching something that I think it’s kinda innovative, and rooted in a lot of in person research that took place in Toronto.
Before I’d even managed to get through explaining what it was, a pretty senior person with responsibility for customer experience cut me off and told me various reasons why they couldn’t make it work. Most of them seemingly excuses to not do something.
When doing the research itself, I kept asking to engage the TTC and share the findings in return, and kept getting fobbed off.
It’s a culture of learned helplessness resulting in a fear of trying anything new, or even attempting to be curious about places that do things differently or better. Because then you’d actually have to try.
In many ways, it’s a similar story in much of Canadian industry. By no means unique to transit in Toronto.
The Toronto (Canadian?) standard is to work in a piecemeal manner rather than with a comprehensive overall plan. This results in much waste of time and effort.
Thank you! The frequent weekend closures and extended streetcar line shutdowns are ridiculous and unnecessary. In fact, the weekend subway shutdowns drain maintenance budget, as they need to schedule several dozen replacement bus drivers and several dozen of info/wayfinding reps for roughly 34+ hours. That budget could instead be used to train and deploy 20-30 more extra highly-paid maintenance workers to get the same work done more quickly / efficiently on 4-5 extended overnights (roughly same total hours), with much less disruption to millions of riders, and less spillover collateral into increased road traffic from the weekend replacement buses. Weekend shutdowns should not have become normalized. Similarly, its infuriating that the TTC didn't fix any slow zones (and get started on ATC on line 2) during the pandemic, when ridership was so low and there was minimal night economy to worry about. Wasted opportunity.
Reece, thank you for this sobering and insightful article. It captures the uniquely Canadian combination of hubris and parochialism that seems to be at the heart of the now grotesque level of incompetence enveloping the TTC. Its management’s apparent contempt for its users, its disinterest in any innovation or meaningful cost control and accountability, and its disregard for “best practices” information from the outside world leaves me in despair. It’s is difficult to understand the criteria by which TTC management, including elected politicians, obtained their positions and are able to keep them. It appears to have more to do with cronyism and a corporate structure overarchingly concerned with self-reproduction rather than basic competence and merit. We’ve seen this movie before and it doesn’t end well. At this point I’d be open to having an outside operator from Asia or Europe take it over, with a dedicated funding commitment, and dispense with management that is clearly not intelligent or honest enough to realize that it is utterly in over its collective head.
If the TTC should take a book out for maintenance work, it should actually be DC. Have a few weekend closures and then a main summer closure (which could include CBTC for line 2-which would be a good thing).
Toronto cannot really afford extended subway closures like American cities, far far more people use transit here and shutting the subway down for weeks would do a lot of harm to the city.
The current Gardiner reconstruction might actually represent a quiet paradigm shift—proof that we don’t have to just accept the status quo when it comes to how major infrastructure is staged and delivered. It's now set to be completed a full year ahead of schedule, which suggests that when the political will and public pressure align—often more forcefully in the case of drivers—the system *can* adapt. It also highlights how much louder and more effective the car lobby tends to be, despite the fact that far more people access the core via transit.
One moment that stood out to me, and which wasn’t mentioned in your piece, is the TTC’s 2010 announcement of the station manager program. I remember being genuinely hopeful at the time—impressed by the idea that each station would have a name attached to it, a person walking its corridors, maintaining standards, and applying a kind of broken windows theory to our transit spaces. Garbage cleaned, lights fixed, broken panels replaced, loiterers dealt with. It was a modest but symbolic step toward accountability.
Fast-forward 15 years, and the reality is bleak: every station feels worse than before. Even the newer ones are showing significant signs of neglect. I don’t pretend to have the answers—funding is clearly an issue, especially when compared to international benchmarks—but the TTC’s decline runs deeper than dollars. It’s systemic, cultural, operational.
Which is why I’m really hoping the next CEO brings true vision—ideally someone from Europe or Asia, where transit is not just respected, but elevated to an art form.
I will say, as someone living in Boston, that the Track Improvement Project, which I believe is the “mutli-week shutdowns” referenced in this post, was executed almost perfectly for the scale and severity of the work that needed to be done. It was disruptive, yes; however, all disruptions were announced months in advance, and the system is tangibly faster and more reliable. I hardly remember the week or two in the summer during which sections of lines relevant to me were closed, but I feel the benefit accross the system from the work completed.
Vancouver just opened an (above ground) infill station with the greatest inconvenience being two months of extended overnight closers for the three stations past it in the line.
The complacency at TTC like in other areas under the responsibility of the city or the province is reaching a tipping point. Same as the cleaning of the 400 highways there is no reason that justify the current status. Where is our tax dollar going I have no idea but someone is probably getting rish
Parkinson's law was the term I never knew I needed until now. I knew the conditions that it met but I didn't realize it actually had a name, and it's what I've been complaining about the TTC for years.
Had a meeting with the TTC recently pitching something that I think it’s kinda innovative, and rooted in a lot of in person research that took place in Toronto.
Before I’d even managed to get through explaining what it was, a pretty senior person with responsibility for customer experience cut me off and told me various reasons why they couldn’t make it work. Most of them seemingly excuses to not do something.
When doing the research itself, I kept asking to engage the TTC and share the findings in return, and kept getting fobbed off.
It’s a culture of learned helplessness resulting in a fear of trying anything new, or even attempting to be curious about places that do things differently or better. Because then you’d actually have to try.
In many ways, it’s a similar story in much of Canadian industry. By no means unique to transit in Toronto.
The Toronto (Canadian?) standard is to work in a piecemeal manner rather than with a comprehensive overall plan. This results in much waste of time and effort.
Thank you! The frequent weekend closures and extended streetcar line shutdowns are ridiculous and unnecessary. In fact, the weekend subway shutdowns drain maintenance budget, as they need to schedule several dozen replacement bus drivers and several dozen of info/wayfinding reps for roughly 34+ hours. That budget could instead be used to train and deploy 20-30 more extra highly-paid maintenance workers to get the same work done more quickly / efficiently on 4-5 extended overnights (roughly same total hours), with much less disruption to millions of riders, and less spillover collateral into increased road traffic from the weekend replacement buses. Weekend shutdowns should not have become normalized. Similarly, its infuriating that the TTC didn't fix any slow zones (and get started on ATC on line 2) during the pandemic, when ridership was so low and there was minimal night economy to worry about. Wasted opportunity.
Reece, thank you for this sobering and insightful article. It captures the uniquely Canadian combination of hubris and parochialism that seems to be at the heart of the now grotesque level of incompetence enveloping the TTC. Its management’s apparent contempt for its users, its disinterest in any innovation or meaningful cost control and accountability, and its disregard for “best practices” information from the outside world leaves me in despair. It’s is difficult to understand the criteria by which TTC management, including elected politicians, obtained their positions and are able to keep them. It appears to have more to do with cronyism and a corporate structure overarchingly concerned with self-reproduction rather than basic competence and merit. We’ve seen this movie before and it doesn’t end well. At this point I’d be open to having an outside operator from Asia or Europe take it over, with a dedicated funding commitment, and dispense with management that is clearly not intelligent or honest enough to realize that it is utterly in over its collective head.
If the TTC should take a book out for maintenance work, it should actually be DC. Have a few weekend closures and then a main summer closure (which could include CBTC for line 2-which would be a good thing).
Toronto cannot really afford extended subway closures like American cities, far far more people use transit here and shutting the subway down for weeks would do a lot of harm to the city.
The current Gardiner reconstruction might actually represent a quiet paradigm shift—proof that we don’t have to just accept the status quo when it comes to how major infrastructure is staged and delivered. It's now set to be completed a full year ahead of schedule, which suggests that when the political will and public pressure align—often more forcefully in the case of drivers—the system *can* adapt. It also highlights how much louder and more effective the car lobby tends to be, despite the fact that far more people access the core via transit.
One moment that stood out to me, and which wasn’t mentioned in your piece, is the TTC’s 2010 announcement of the station manager program. I remember being genuinely hopeful at the time—impressed by the idea that each station would have a name attached to it, a person walking its corridors, maintaining standards, and applying a kind of broken windows theory to our transit spaces. Garbage cleaned, lights fixed, broken panels replaced, loiterers dealt with. It was a modest but symbolic step toward accountability.
Fast-forward 15 years, and the reality is bleak: every station feels worse than before. Even the newer ones are showing significant signs of neglect. I don’t pretend to have the answers—funding is clearly an issue, especially when compared to international benchmarks—but the TTC’s decline runs deeper than dollars. It’s systemic, cultural, operational.
Which is why I’m really hoping the next CEO brings true vision—ideally someone from Europe or Asia, where transit is not just respected, but elevated to an art form.
I will say, as someone living in Boston, that the Track Improvement Project, which I believe is the “mutli-week shutdowns” referenced in this post, was executed almost perfectly for the scale and severity of the work that needed to be done. It was disruptive, yes; however, all disruptions were announced months in advance, and the system is tangibly faster and more reliable. I hardly remember the week or two in the summer during which sections of lines relevant to me were closed, but I feel the benefit accross the system from the work completed.
Vancouver just opened an (above ground) infill station with the greatest inconvenience being two months of extended overnight closers for the three stations past it in the line.
I mean, you can even look to WMATA, which has climbed out of a similar slump over the past 5-10 years
The complacency at TTC like in other areas under the responsibility of the city or the province is reaching a tipping point. Same as the cleaning of the 400 highways there is no reason that justify the current status. Where is our tax dollar going I have no idea but someone is probably getting rish
Parkinson's law was the term I never knew I needed until now. I knew the conditions that it met but I didn't realize it actually had a name, and it's what I've been complaining about the TTC for years.