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Oliver Jones

Hello and welcome to Leading into Tomorrow — a podcast series from EY exploring how public sector organizations can innovate to respond to future challenges and opportunities. I’m Oly Jones, EY-Parthenon’s Global at [specific legal entity name] Leader for the Government and Public Sector. Each episode, we’re joined by expert guests for unique insight into how they’ve created strategies and are leading operational transformation. Our focus this time is on public transport. Joining us from Canada is Angela Gibson, Head of Strategy and Foresight at the Toronto Transit Commission. Hello Angela.

Angela Gibson

Hello Oly. It’s great to be here.

Jones

It’s great to have you, and my EY colleague, Josh Colle, Senior Vice President, Cities, Transit and Infrastructure at EY, also based in Toronto. Hello, Josh.

Josh Colle

Hi Oly. Great to be here.

Jones

Angela, first of all, can you tell us all a little bit more about the work of the Toronto Transit Commission itself?

Gibson

That’s a really big question. The Toronto Transit Commission, known as the TTC, is the third-largest transit agency in North America. We serve a population in Toronto of about 2.7 million people, and we move everyone on buses, street cars and subways. I would say that one of the biggest challenges is really serving a really diverse population and ensuring that we move everyone to where they want to go.

Jones

Can you also just give us a sense of what your personal role entails as the Head of Strategy and Foresight?

Gibson

So, I’m responsible for three streams of work. The first piece is customer policy and ensuring that the whole customer experience lens is really fully baked into everything that we do. That could be everything from fare policy, fare evasion policies to accessibility.

The next stream of work that I do is system planning. We do a multiyear, five-year service plan and we want to ensure that we’re really thinking ahead about the different transit initiatives that we should be doing and how we’re applying our service. That could also include everything from AV shuttles and really looking at new innovations that we should be thinking about.

Then there’s the third stream, which we call emerging systems. Emerging systems looks at really doing the business cases for things that we probably are not even ready for. That could be modernizing our fare collection system. That could be looking at digital connectivity and what that looks like over the next 10 years. It also could be looking at eliminating and retiring our legacy fare media. So, looking at business cases and ensuring that we’re really positioned for the future and that we can move relatively quickly.

Jones

Perhaps I could ask you just to talk about the current situation, the current challenges but also, perhaps, some of the opportunities facing the public transport network in Toronto.

Gibson

The biggest challenge that we’re facing is we’ve had two years of the pandemic that we’ve seen our ridership plummet. We were having over 500 million riders a year on our system. On a weekday, average weekday, we’re having 1.7 million riders on our system. We’ve seen that plummet to, at the lowest case of COVID-19 pandemic, to less than 20%. Now, we’re back at around plus 60% of our pre-COVID ridership.

Our biggest challenge is that we had a fare box recovery. That means that the amount of money that we were receiving for the fare box to stay afloat was about 62% before COVID-19 pandemic. Now, we’re in a position where we’re not seeing that number, so how do we sustain ourselves? How do we make decisions around pivoting into this uncertain future of where we had it really great for so long?

I'll give you another picture about that, that 30% of the daily trips in Toronto were transit trips. In North America, that’s unheard of. That’s such a huge level of transit ridership in our city. Our challenge is thinking where do we go from here? How do we reposition transit? Do we change the way that we need to think about our priorities? Are we going to retreat and go back and look at about how do we recover and how we get back to what it was before, or is there an opportunity for us to look at things differently?

Jones

What are you thinking of doing? Have you got as far as some actions in terms of how you'll respond to this and what kind of measures you will put in place to try and boost ridership and win people back?

Gibson

The majority of our customers are working in the downtown area. It means that there’s only so much we can do to encourage people to get on our system. But if they're not going to work in the downtown area, then we’re not going to be able to get them back. However, some of the other things that we’ve learned is that we’ve seen essential workers continue to use our system throughout the pandemic. We’ve seen people who are shift workers use the system throughout the pandemic. We’ve seen women and people with low income use our system. We’ve also seen our bus network actually perform quite well over the last two years — in most cases it’s been about over 50% of ridership during that time.

It tells us that we probably should be prioritizing on our bus network in our areas where it’s underserved by rapid transit. We should be doing some things differently. The work of my team, they’ve been working on an initiative that we’ve termed as Rapid TO, TO is for Toronto. We’ve been working on identifying bus routes that are really outperforming some rapid transit routes in other regions. What can we do really quickly to make them a bus rapid transit system?

We did this at the end of 2020 in one key corridor, and we’ve seen substantive increase in system performance by doing that. What we’re trying to do is do that elsewhere in the city. That’s one area that we’re doing. The other area that we’re working on is that whole overall customer experience. How I think we can encourage people to come back is that they want to come back to a better TTC. I would like them to feel romanced by the TTC, if we could do that with transit.

That could be everything from what can we do on the digital side of things to have people have the better amenities that they didn’t have before. It’s obviously the things that we’re doing on operations by making sure that our vehicles are clean so that people feel safe and doing initiatives so that people can feel that they have better access to information.

Jones

Josh, you have the oversight of lots of work across Canada and, indeed, wider North America. I thought I'd just ask you, are there cities and other regions facing similar challenges and what are some other cities doing in the face of those challenges?

Colle

I think the TTC's certainly complex and has its challenges, which Angela has outlined. But public transit and transport across North America has had a real struggle over the last while, for all the reasons that she stated, and so the focus now of course is on recovery and bringing those riders back. I think a few things that are happening that give pause for hope but also can maybe be replicated in other places. One of the things we saw with transit systems and cities across the continent, and really the globe, was all of a sudden, new initiatives were able to be implemented at speeds we had never seen.

Somehow, we were able to cut through inertia and red tape and some of the bureaucratic challenges to see things like dedicated bus lanes and different fare structures implemented at speeds we’d never seen before. On top of it, there was this huge explosion of the introduction of active transportation including bikes and bike infrastructure, even improving the walking environment for people that wanted to connect to public transit that way or have an alternative that wasn’t a personal vehicle.

I think one of the lessons, hopefully, that will be learned and captured is how can we continue to introduce at that pace, introduce pilots that we can test, and it’s okay to fail with some of those pilots? Then to also look at how do we make some of those temporary fixes permanent? You're seeing that in Toronto but you're seeing it in jurisdictions across the globe really, where that improved bus network, that bike or walking connectivity that got you to public transit, that was done in a time of the pandemic, has been made permanent and because of it, I think everyone’s benefiting.

I think what it’s also starting to do, which is a really important conversation that’s happening, is that public transit cannot only be measured by how many riders use the system. I really think that, and you're hearing this conversation everywhere, that public transit is part of one of many tools in a toolbox that’s helping cities become more sustainable, less congested, reach lots of different social policy goals. So, the way we fund transit and the way we deem transit to be successful has to be looked at in a different way, shifted away just from that ridership metric, and I think that conversation’s happening and that’s an encouraging one.

Gibson

We have an equity lens that we’ve developed, which really emphasizes the neighborhood improvement areas, the areas where we’re seeing people go into more blue collar work so that we can give them more priority. That equity lens, we’re using it in different applications. We’re using it for thinking about the design of our new trains and the design of our new buses. We’re using it in the sense of how do we prioritize where we put public Wi-Fi as we’re testing this out on our buses.

It's having that equity lens which says we need to make sure that areas that are low income are really seen, and we can emphasize their needs.

Colle

We all recognize what kind of driver transit can be in terms of building communities. But I think what the TTC's done in the city of Toronto is begun to be more intentional about where those investments are made, where things are planned, so that that benefit of building community and of making spaces is enjoyed by more people than traditionally may have been if it was purely looked at just through a transit planning or an engineer’s point of view. With that, it triggers some really important conversations about how you prioritize, there’s always scarce dollars and so that’s an important one to have.

The thing that’s encouraging is that the conversation has shifted, I think in a really positive way, to recognize that the power of those investments, the power of having access, the power of public transit in terms of building up communities and connecting people and improving lives can happen in lots of places and parts of the city, and that that prioritizing doesn’t always have to be based on some of the old school metrics that often left those people and communities on the outside looking in.

Jones

We’re going to move on now and, coming next, we’ll talk more about leading an organization through cultural change — and the public transport sector is certainly a sector that has sometimes needed cultural change — so we’ll talk about that next.

Jones

Now, most of us who have been in this space for a long time have seen that there’s a strong change, and Angela, you outlined this earlier too, a much more customer- and community-centric focus.

Gibson

Thirty years ago, strategy was just eliminated from the TTC. We were very much a — we still are a — very operational organization, but there wasn’t that foresight in what's happening next. With the leadership with Rick Leary, he decided a number of years ago to bring strategy back into our organization. And it’s on two fronts. I am on the client and planning front with strategy and foresight, as I said. There’s also innovation and sustainability that is looking at, on the vehicle side of things, how we can innovate and really prepare ourselves for a net-zero future. So really looking at ways that we can better tackle climate change and really be a key facilitator of change on that side.

We’re bringing business cases into the way that we justify our planning. The second thing is that multiyear planning is key. Having the organization prepare itself for what's happening in the next number of years, I think is so necessary.

Jones

Josh, can I turn to you and ask you to comment on the picture that Angela’s just painted around the need to reinsert strategy and foresight and forward planning into transportation operations and planning more generally? Is that a process you see being repeated around North America?

Colle

It is, Oly, and in some instances, unfortunately, it’s not happening and it needs to. Unsurprisingly, transit’s been dominated by engineers. I love engineers, don’t get me wrong, but it’s been dominated by people and thinking that looks at almost — instead of customers, it’s almost like you're moving widgets along an assembly line. Not moving people and trying to get people to destinations and help improve their lives.

Because of that — and it’s really embedded in the industry — because of that, often your thinking and your approaches are not ones that would embrace innovation, would not foster leadership that is more innovative and maybe looks at the world differently, or even the diversity in leadership and thinking that is so valuable and we know is so valuable.

I think the industry’s in this moment of change and you're seeing, where organizations embrace new thinking, new leadership, some of that sensibility that risk is okay, that we expect you to innovate and that you're actually serving people at the end of the day. Those are the leadership characteristics that result in better service, in better investment, in better use of scarce taxpayer dollars. That’s almost this existential moment that many organizations in this space are having, but the industry as a whole is.

Gibson

Josh, when you said that it reminded me — one of the challenges that I put to my team is every time that we write a report, every presentation, every time that we’re having a conversation, we should be playing customer bingo. If “customer” is not said in the paragraph or at least five times in the paragraph so we can say “bingo,” then we’re doing something wrong. We need to be more diverse.

As a black woman in this sector, I need to bring that to the table. I don’t park that and leave that at home. I bring that so that I say, “This is my experience on the system as a woman. This is my experience as a black person on the system.” That has to influence our policies and that has to be able to build the change so that we’re building a better system for the people that we’re serving.

Jones

Just to end with, a final question for you, Angela. It's a difficult one. If you had one piece of advice for a leader in a position similar to yours, facing similar challenges, what would that one piece of advice be?

Gibson

I think you have to connect with other people in your sector and outside your organization. The best support I've gotten is really reaching out to others who are building that collaborative bank of colleagues who can help you and check you, I think is key to that. We're in a sector that, you know, Toronto Transit Commission is not unique. Other agencies are going through the same thing, and I get inspired when I'm speaking to other colleagues in other agencies who are validating what I'm going through and then they're giving me different ideas. Then I can bring that into the TTC and share those ideas.

I think that's probably the power of that peer relationship, I think is really, really key. The folks that work at the TTC are top-notch. When you provide a platform to give them a voice to do their job, it’s like you have a whole army of generals that are doing this work, and I think that also makes it really great to work in that kind of environment.

Jones

It's been great speaking with you. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Gibson

Well, thank you for having me.

Jones

Josh, a big thanks to you for joining us too.

Colle

My pleasure, Oly. Great to chat with you and Angela both on these important issues.

Jones

In this podcast series, you can hear from more expert guests talking about how they are leading transformation. Do subscribe so you won't miss an episode. From me, Oly Jones, Angela Gibson and Josh Colle, thank you for listening, and goodbye.

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