These are tough times for the Toronto Transit Commission and its millions of users. The service simply has not kept pace with growth in ridership, leaving many fuming at their bus, streetcar and subway stops. But the system's worst critic may be its own CEO, Andy Byford, a veteran of London's tube whose tough assignment is to get Toronto's trains to run on time. In a new Star Dispatches ebook, offered here in its entirety, our transportation reporter reckons with the man facing the multi-billion-dollar challenge. Can Andy Byford make public transit in Toronto efficient, punctual, and pleasant again?

1. “Abysmal ”

Two years from the day he was officially named CEO of the Toronto Transit Commission, Andy Byford admits it has been an “abysmal” week. “It’s like a blow to the heart that two days in a row we’ve screwed up our customers,” laments the British-born transit chief from his office above the Davisville subway station.

Byford has spent his brief tenure promising TTC riders and workers that if they just stick with him, he will deliver a transit renaissance within the next five years. But on March 12, signal problems between Bloor and Eglinton snarled the evening rush. And today, his anniversary, a frozen switch near Davisville is causing more than the usual delays on the Yonge subway. The platforms are backed up 12 deep with riders waiting to board at the notorious Bloor-Yonge bottleneck. To make matters worse, transit control takes a southbound train out of service, disgorging about 1,300 customers at Summerhill into the bitter cold.

If that’s not bad enough, no one has been able to immediately tell Byford why the train was taken out of service at Summerhill. Later it turns out that the crew was concerned a trainstop arm wasn’t working. It’s a vital piece of fail-safe equipment that kicks in if an operator blows past a red light in the tunnel.

Days later, Byford admits it was the right decision. But for a manager whose mantra is accountability, being unaware of just how badly that morning’s service was running, even for a short time, is simply untenable.

Riders don’t care how many customer service charters the TTC publishes. It means nothing if they’re late for work, he says in obvious frustration. And there’s the rub for Byford, viewed by many as the city’s best hope for transforming the cash-starved, over-subscribed TTC into a 21st-century operation that, as the system’s motto goes, “makes Toronto proud.”

Byford, who rose through the ranks of the London Underground before spending nearly three years as COO of the giant RailCorp system in Sydney, Australia, has lived up to many of his promises at the TTC. The washrooms, trains and stations are cleaner. The collector booths, once a mishmash of hand scrawled post-its, are now decked in official TTC signage. There are six group station managers overseeing staff and customers at every subway stop. Even the old red TTC uniforms are getting an update, right down to the janitors who will be wearing new cargo pants and polo shirts this spring.

There are new trains, a new computerized signal system for the Yonge-University Spadina line, new streetcars and electronic fare cards in the works, and in 2016, plans to open six new subway stops northwest into York Region.

The new five-year corporate plan also promises: fewer staff members running trains and more face-to-face with customers; reduced fare cheating; standardized and more TTC signage, with information screens in every station; expanded Wi-Fi and cell service on subway platforms; more reliable service; cleaner stations; new service disruption teams to help riders when there’s a prolonged service failure; and new community-engagement strategies.

But none of it is enough. The TTC simply doesn’t have the capacity to carry its ridership, which continues to grow every year. About 85 per cent of transit trips in the Toronto region include a ride on the TTC. In 2014, the system expects to carry 540 million riders, up from 526 million last year. Every day, transit vehicles bypass customers at the curb because there is no more room on the bus or streetcar. That’s happening even though, in a cost-cutting exercise two years ago, the TTC increased the crowding levels of its buses and, more recently, introduced longer, articulated buses on the busiest routes.

For more than two years, there has been a standing slow order limiting train speeds through the busy stretch between St. Clair and Eglinton stations. That’s because the original, 60-year-old track bed, which should have been rebuilt 20 years ago, isn’t stable enough to handle higher-speed trains.

Don’t even get Byford started on the creaking Scarborough RT, which suffers regular shutdowns — particularly in foul weather, when riders crave speed and shelter most. The SRT crews, he says, work nothing less than miracles to keep that 32-year-old system operating each day beyond its lifespan.

And then there’s the failing fleet of 35-year-old streetcars that lumber through congested downtown streets attracting a sea of criticism from riders, motorists and politicians.

At the two-year mark in his job, no one is more keenly aware than the CEO that all the goodwill the TTC has worked to restore with the riding public could turn on a dime. If he has any doubts, the riders themselves are spelling it out. Among the complaints rolling in is one that begins something to the effect of: “You seem like a nice guy but that’s no longer enough . . . “

One rider’s email describes being “stuffed into a car like some animal” at Ossington station, only to be trapped in the centre of the subway and unable to leave when another customer delays the train by letting his backpack get caught in the door. “Credibility seems to be what is desperately needed . . . I have always been supportive, but you are making it very difficult,” writes the rider.

Even after 25 years of working in public transit, Byford, who admits to being his own harshest critic, feels personally stung. “I do have a fear that there’s sort of a honeymoon period. You raise expectations. People say, ‘You said the TTC would be better.’ Well, yes. But some of this takes time. I am aware of that, which is why I’m so keen to get more successes under our belt.”

People who write to Byford are frequently surprised to receive a prompt personal response. And more than one TTC customer has been shocked to find the system’s CEO boarding their bus or streetcar following a complaint. In one instance last year, a cynical rider wrote that he expected his complaint would be ignored; Byford actually showed up at his front door.

Byford, 48, describes his MO as simply this: “Silence the critics, dumbfound the skeptics and delight the customers.” It’s the way he has always rolled, according to his former boss, now the managing director of the London Underground. “He’s always been on the cutting edge of doing things a little bit differently than the norm,” says Mike Brown.

Byford worked for Brown in at least three different roles as the pair moved up in the Underground. But Byford was still a relatively junior manager when they teamed up on the Metropolitan line, a usually reliable route that was suffering from bouts of poor service due to an aging signal system and older trains.

One night, Brown remembers, Byford got on the public address system and announced he would be going through the trains during the evening rush to speak personally with riders about their experiences. It was something no Tube manager had done before, and it set a new benchmark for how the Underground interacted with its riders, says Brown who, even now, recalls it as a remarkable thing.

“I think he embarrassed a lot of his colleagues on some of the other lines, who thought, ‘Oh my goodness, here’s this Young Turk coming in and doing this sort of stuff,’ and somebody else had been running the line for years and never thought of doing it. In many ways that is probably the greatest illustration of Andy’s ability to take things on the chin and hold himself accountable for stuff directly.”

Perhaps that’s why the disappointing service on his second anniversary as CEO comes as such a blow — the TTC’s performance looked an awful lot like it did almost exactly one year earlier.

But on March 19, 2013, following a similarly grim run, the headlines were less about frustrated customers than the transit chief himself. The TTC released a YouTube video showing Byford on the subway platform apologizing for an unacceptable commute the previous afternoon.

In May, he issued another apology following a water main break that flooded Lawrence station the same afternoon that assorted streetcar issues snarled evening commutes. In July, Byford did it again, taking to the subway PA system to apologize for a signal-related delay that stymied the morning rush service and extended into the busy midday.

But if Torontonians were somewhat mollified by the show of contrition, not all TTC staff felt the same. There were those who felt the public apologies made them look like they were to blame for the system’s inadequacies when the root cause was a longstanding lack of political and financial investment.

Still, Byford doesn’t regret telling customers he’s sorry. “I will apologize if it is our fault,” he says. “I’m sorry if we wash a platform down or wash the track bed and we put so much bloody water down that it causes the track surface to drop and we end up taking an hour to get from Finch to College, too right, I am going to apologize.” At the same time, he adds, rider relations shouldn’t be kowtowing. “I do believe the customer’s always right. But the staff isn’t always wrong.”

Despite her boss’s rolled-up-sleeves determination, the enormity of his challenge occasionally shows, says Joan Taylor, the chief of staff whom Byford brought on board a year ago to build bridges within the TTC and between the transit system and city hall. “When the system has a bad week, you can see it in him. You can see it on his face, you can hear it. He has his weekly meetings with the exec. A lot of that is performance-based and, he will be asking tough questions. I think those are times when he thinks, ‘Is this ever going to get better?’ “

Some weeks, says Taylor, it doesn’t matter what you do, “The system’s old, the signals are failing. It is what it is.” And, as the TTC tries to catch up with a generation of under-investment, it’s going to get worse before it gets better, she warns.

“How long people are going to be patient with the changes that are coming and the influx of new systems, new rail, new streetcars. All those things will make a difference, but it’s not going to happen overnight. The catching up is creating more and more problems and it’s impacting daily commutes and frustrating people to no end.”

2. A rude arrival

It was awkward, but Andy Byford could never say he wasn’t warned.

In the summer of 2011, on a visit to his Canadian wife’s family in Toronto, Byford had arranged to meet with the head of the TTC. Chief general manager Gary Webster was hiring a chief operating officer. He knew enough about Byford to believe the Sydney RailCorp executive had the breadth of experience, plus a badly needed outsider’s perspective, to lead the TTC out of a dark period in which riders and transit workers had gone to war over failing, discourteous service.

Byford had spoken with Webster before about another job, a newly created customer service management position. But it was evident to both men that chief operating officer would be a better fit for Byford.

The customer service job, which ultimately went to Byford’s former London Tube colleague, Chris Upfold, had been recommended by a blue ribbon panel appointed in 2010 to figure out how the TTC could become less focused on engineering and more centred on riders. Byford was aware of the TTC’s customer service travails. Reports of sleeping subway collectors, rude operators and long lineups for subway tokens — a daily feature in Toronto headlines since November 2010 — had made their way across the time zones to Sydney.

But Byford, who loved the sophisticated lifestyle and coastal setting of Australia’s largest city, was attracted to the TTC’s mess. He saw it as an opportunity to get in on a high-profile corporate turnaround, and he was intrigued by the TTC’s integration of subway, bus and streetcar service into a single system.

It would also cement his position as favoured son-in-law by helping bring his wife, Alison, home to her large family in Toronto and Ottawa.

The day of the interview, Byford, a stickler for punctuality, arrived early at TTC headquarters. He walked across the road to the Starbucks for a bit and then wandered up Yonge St., mentally reviewing the points he wanted to set out in the interview.

He had heard rumblings about the politics surrounding the TTC. But as he returned to Davisville for the meeting, a newspaper headline stopped him in his tracks. “Ford plots to oust TTC chief,” was splashed across the front page of the Toronto Star. He bought a copy, scanned the story and headed up to the seventh floor for his interview.

It was Webster who mentioned the embarrassing headline first. “Don’t worry about that,” he told Byford. “It’s just politics.”

The TTC’s recruitment process was slow and bureaucratic. Byford says Canada’s immigration services were as much to blame as the TTC and the city. But at the time he was interviewing, the transit company was mired in fractious politics: word was that Mayor Rob Ford was dead set on removing Webster, and he made no secret of his displeasure with his handpicked TTC chair, Councillor Karen Stintz. Both were resisting Ford’s plans to extend the Sheppard subway. Stintz wouldn’t support the mayor without a viable subway funding plan. Webster, an engineer who had come up through the ranks of the TTC, would not back down from his position that ligh rail was the most suitable transit technology for Sheppard.

When Byford finally got the call offering him the COO position, he and Alison agonized over whether to abandon Sydney so soon. Ultimately, though, the lure of family and North America’s third largest transit system won out.

When they landed, it wasn’t the gray November chill that would challenge their decision to leave Australia. It was the silence of the TTC’s seventh-floor executive offices.

Byford’s Australia employer, RailCorp — a kind of combined GO and Via rail service that serves commuters and longer-distance travellers — is headquartered in a modern building. The executive offices ring an open plan workspace that buzzes with collegial banter.

TTC headquarters, meanwhile, is called the MacBrien Building. The furnishings and fixtures are of a similar vintage to its namesake, former TTC chair William MacBrien, who died in 1954. “I was stuck in this fuddy-duddy old building with this old-fashioned furniture on a silent floor,” Byford recalls. “They showed me around the building but no one came in to see me.

“In that first month I really, really missed Australia, almost to the point that, had the minister phoned me up and said, ‘Oh come on, you’ve made your point, come back,’ I would have been seriously tempted. I really missed Sydney and my buddies down there, and the lifestyle.”

He nevertheless spent his first weeks riding and photographing the TTC, meeting operators and customers and taking stock of what needed doing. But as his comfort level grew, so did his curiosity about where he’d landed.

Management wasn’t using “key performance indicators,” the standard business measures, to track the company’s progress on any number of fronts. Upfold, an immediate ally, had been talking about them since he arrived in Toronto that May. But they hadn’t been implemented. Having stickhandled some of the trickiest issues involving fares and service in London, Upfold was quite obviously not being used to his potential.

There were no “challenge meetings” in which executives were expected to answer for their performance. There was no over-arching corporate plan to repair not only the performance but the ailing reputation of the TTC.

Then, on New Year’s Eve, Byford sent his wife home to their temporary downtown digs promising to follow her in half an hour while he went down to check on subway service at Queen, where riders were streaming out of the David Pecaut Square celebrations. He became alarmed at the lack of staff and organization on the platforms. When he asked for a bullhorn to try and move riders along the platform himself, it couldn’t be found right away. When someone finally retrieved it from a forgotten cupboard, its batteries were dead.

Returning to work, he wrote a scathing memo about the lack of planning and preparedness, a situation Byford feared could have put rider safety at risk, in part because there wasn’t enough staff working that night. He showed the missive to Webster, who immediately agreed with its direction. It was, after all, precisely why the 37-year transit head had brought an outsider in as his intended successor.

Several weeks later, on a Friday afternoon in February, TTC executives got their first inkling that the politics Webster had brushed aside the previous summer were about to explode. Stintz, who had been branded Public Enemy No. 1 by the Ford administration, was out of the country on a break with her young children. TTC general secretary Vince Rodo had received word that five of the TTC’s board members, the required majority, wanted a special meeting the Tuesday after the upcoming long weekend. The agenda: a staff member’s performance. The petition to hold the meeting was signed by five Ford loyalists: Councillors Minnan-Wong, Frank DiGiorgio, Vince Crisanti, Cesar Palacio and Norm Kelly.

On the seventh floor, TTC officials suspected what the media would be reporting by dinnertime — that the subject of the special meeting was Webster. The chief general manager certainly knew; he had met with Minnan-Wong earlier that week in a hotel bar. The councillor had told him in no uncertain terms he had to go. Webster had refused.

There was no way to prevent the special board meeting from going ahead, so Byford and his wife headed to her parents’ place outside Ottawa for the Family Day long weekend. There, on his usual run through the countryside, it hit him that only three months into the job, he might very well be in charge of the entire company after the Tuesday meeting at city hall. It didn’t occur to him that he could be fired too. He hadn’t been there long enough to make himself a target.

On Tuesday morning, Webster’s inner circle, including Rodo, TTC communications director Brad Ross and Chris Upfold, gathered in the chief executive’s corner office to consider the potential scenarios for the day. Byford, whose chief concern was making the whole day less horrible for his boss, fetched bagels and coffee from the Tim Hortons across the street. Then, in solidarity with Webster, the whole group took the subway to city hall.

No sooner was the meeting convened than the board went into private session. Webster, Ross and Byford headed to Stintz’s office. As the general secretary, Rodo was required to stay in the meeting where Stintz and three other Webster supporters on the board, Councillors Peter Milczyn, Maria Augimeri and John Parker, argued that Webster should be permitted to retire at the end of the year, as he had planned. Reporters, city councillors and TTC observers lingered in the hall straining to hear the oft-raised voices that leaked through the room’s glass walls.

It was a long wait — about four hours. It would later emerge that much of that time was spent trying to determine whether Byford could be named immediately as Webster’s successor. His immigration visa, however, specified his job title as COO.

In Stintz’s office those hours felt much longer. “It was awkward because after a while you run out of things to talk about,” says Byford. They chatted about what might happen. When that speculation was exhausted, the three discussed sports, other TTC business, summer cottages.

“I felt so sorry for (Gary) because he would go quiet and look down and shake his head from time to time,” Byford recalls. “You could tell he was reflecting.” There were texts coming from inside the meeting throughout the afternoon and then, suddenly, word arrived that the board had decided it would vote on Webster’s fate. The public went back into the room. The TTC head and his team remained in Stintz’s office.

After the vote to fire Webster without cause, his supporters stopped at Stintz’s office to express their regrets at the shabby dismissal. A few minutes later, Webster maintained his dignity in the midst of a crush of reporters and cameras, expressing gratitude for the 37 years he had enjoyed working for the TTC and assuring the public that they were in good hands with Byford.

“If I could conduct myself half as professionally as Gary Webster I would be doing well,” says Byford.

After the political bloodletting, Webster went back to his office at Davisville, where he sent some notes to staff and wrote a farewell to the organization where he had, over the course of his career, led every single department.

Then, as he rode the subway back to Union Station, where he would board the GO train to his home east of the city, commuters expressed their sympathy and wished him well. His team — Byford, Ross, Upfold and Rodo — headed for a post-mortem over beer and wings. “It was the weirdest day of my professional career,” says Byford. “I had confidence I could do it but I hadn’t reached that job in the way I wanted to reach it. That’s not the way I wanted to succeed to the top.” The next morning, he rolled up his sleeves and took the tiller, reassuring staff and meeting the media.

On the weekend, Byford and Alison drove across the border to Buffalo, had a look around and crossed back at Niagara Falls so he could have his job title changed on his visa.

Stintz maintains there was never any reason to oust Webster. “If Gary had been allowed to go on his own terms,” she says, “we would have been in the same place now.”

3. London calling

If you work for the London Underground, it becomes embedded in your psyche, according to the TTC’s chief customer officer. Considered by some to be Byford’s closest colleague, Chris Upfold was named deputy CEO in March. And like the boss, he worked extensively in the Tube —10 years versus Byford’s 14. The pair even knew each other in London, though they weren’t direct colleagues.

Upfold is a Canadian who married a Brit. Byford is an Englishman with a Canadian wife. But there is one area of divergence: Upfold loves his tea while Byford, when offered a cuppa, says “Never touch the stuff” with a shudder.

At the TTC they speak the same language, literally. For example, Brits refer to the assembly that holds the wheels in place under a vehicle as “bogies.” In North America, they’re usually called trucks.

Upfold, the witty keeper of the TTC’s increasingly sophisticated customer data, says the Tube explains a lot about Byford. It also shows that the TTC’s recent customer crisis wasn’t unique.

—

In 1987, 31 people were killed and dozens more injured when a fire that started on one of the century-old wooden escalators at King’s Cross station in London left them trapped in a locked hallway. The investigation into the tragedy contained in a document known as “The Fennell Report” was an indictment of the benign neglect that had crept into the transit system.

“They were wooden escalators and there was widespread evidence people were smoking even though smoking wasn’t allowed inside stations,” says Upfold. “Nobody had done anything about it. It was a match. They turned a blind eye because the thinking was, ‘We’re safe and we’d really never had a fire.’ “ In truth, there had been fires on those escalators. But the typical response was that a ticket collector would go down and beat out the fire with a broom.

The transit organization was so traumatized by the disaster that the next 12 years were spent ingraining a culture of safety, continues Upfold — “Making sure our risks are managed, that we know what they are, that we get all the wooden escalators out of the system. If we say we’re not going to allow smoking, that we actively don’t allow smoking.”

It wasn’t until about 2000, when the London underground moved to privatize some of its operations, that transit officials were forced to take a hard look at riders’ expectations and the service the Tube was providing.

You can overlay almost precisely the same experience on the TTC, according to Upfold. It just happened here later. In 1995, two trains collided near Russell Hill on the Yonge subway. Three people were killed and dozens injured. Under the direction of legendary chief general manager David Gunn, the TTC used that accident as justification for a tight, renewed focus on what the transit industry calls “state of good repair.”

Gunn’s MO was to focus on making sure the existing system was running as safely and efficiently as possible. He wasn’t interested in transit expansion and, under his leadership, the organization’s focus never veered from equipment and infrastructure.

Fast-forward 15 years, and the TTC was safe. But riders were increasingly aware that their priorities were running a distant second to those of the people who operated the system. That’s when a storm of public outrage rolled in. The approval of a fare hike in late 2009 prompted transit officials to ration tokens to prevent riders from hoarding them at a lower price. The resulting lineups at subway stations as people repeatedly waited to buy more tokens was quickly followed by an outbreak of unflattering images of transit workers, notably a collector asleep in his booth.

At the same time, anger was building among transit users already at the breaking point following years of being packed into subways like sardines, streetcars turned back before reaching their destinations and crammed buses. But now the riders had a vent for their rage. Social media was also burgeoning. It provided an outlet for rider fury and a place where mainstream media were only too happy to go hunting for headlines.

Sue Motahedin, head of the TTC customer service centre. was a member of the blue-ribbon panel of mostly private sector customer service experts appointed by the TTC board in February 2010 to find answers. The following August it released 78 recommendations to make the transit system more customer-focused, chief among them appointment of a customer service executive, the job that Upfold ultimately won.

At the time of her panel appointment, Motahedin was a customer service expert with Telus, a communications company that led with the slogan, “The future is friendly.” She remembers hearing the TTC described as militaristic. But Motahedin had a different impression. “I got the feeling people wanted to change but didn’t know how,” she says. “There wasn’t enough communication, not enough sharing of common goals.”

After 11 years at Telus, she saw an opportunity to take a direct role in the company’s turnaround. She’s in charge of the 65 TTC customer service employees in a sixth-floor office at Davisville — surroundings that she says give off a nostalgic Mad Men vibe.

—

Byford, whose grandfather drove a bus for 50 years and whose dad worked in insurance but also did a stint in systems administration at the Tube’s offices, joined the London Underground two years after the King’s Cross fire. Within eight years he would be the group station manager in charge of the iconic stop.

A career in transit wasn’t Byford’s first choice, although his dad had counselled him that transport was a solid option.

At university, Byford studied languages. He graduated with fluent French and German, and fancied a career as a diplomat. He almost got there, too. Byford sat the civil service exams and did well. But the British Foreign Office, still a bastion of snobbery, wasn’t sufficiently impressed with Byford’s University of Leicester credentials. “That’s not exactly Eton or Oxford, is it?” he says.

Still, the country was eager to acquire the ambitious graduate’s services and offered Byford his choice of postings on domestic soil. He selected Her Majesty’s Custom and Excise, figuring he would spend some time riffling through luggage at Dover before getting into the investigative side of the work. He had a kind of James Bond fantasy and saw himself charging across the English Channel on an inflatable, commandeering a ship smuggling contraband.

But the public service starting salary was dire, and the wheels of the British bureaucracy turned slowly. He decided to keep his options open while waiting for his application to be processed. That’s how he ended up at a career fair in London. Coincidentally, that day the Tube was on strike and Byford remembers having to walk the entire distance.

The strike hadn’t stopped some luckless Underground recruiter from setting up at the job fair. Byford turned up to find the poor bloke set upon by angry riders. He was visibly relieved when Byford actually approached looking for career information. The Leicester grad liked what he heard.

In 1989, the Tube was a rigid, hierarchical organization. Head office staff looked down their noses at frontline workers, whose uniforms were issued with scant attention to fit. New recruits went to an office at the Park Royal Tube station, where their surname was called and they were issued shirts, hats and trousers that Byford describes as a kind of punishment — “unlined, scratchy, horrible synthetic.”

Byford’s proud dad, who stopped in at Regent’s Park station with a camera one day, captured his son as a station foreman in full uniform, much of his face shaded by a giant “Elmer Fudd” style topper. As broad as it was, the hat was actually too small. It left a ring around Byford’s forehead and gave him a headache. Like many aspects of working on the Tube, it wasn’t optional.

Andy Byford during his time working for the London Tube

Byford’s 100-year-old station on the Bakerloo line was built deep underground. The hydraulic elevators were notoriously unreliable and, as the foreman, he wasn’t allowed to ride them anyway because he carried the keys to the lift.

There were no radios. So if the train operator wanted to deliver a message or speak with the station foreman, he would sound the whistle as he pulled in. Byford would be forced to run down a long spiral staircase to platform level.

Only once, tired at the end of a long shift, he actually rode the elevator back up to the station entrance. He remembers it as “the longest ride of my life.” If the elevator failed in the shaft, he would have been forced to press the alarm summoning an inspector from Piccadilly Circus. “Of course his first question would be, ‘What were you doing riding the lift with your keys in your pocket?’ “

Byford recalls his years on the Tube with obvious affection. He remains so committed to the concept of local station management that he has implemented a similar group station manager system on the TTC, calling it one of the key decisions he has taken since coming to Toronto.

In London, group station managers are also known as centurions because they typically oversee a staff of about 100 people. At the TTC, the station manager model is off to a slow start. Six GSMs were named last April, and at least one of the new managers supervises only eight employees.

“At the time of the King’s Cross fire,” he says, “no one really knew who their boss was, they didn’t have a named manager. So there was no accountability.” That meant when something went wrong at the station, staff could always blame someone else.

At the TTC where there is a tradition of minimal staff presence in subway stations — a collector or two in most cases and frequently remote supervision, each property now has a named point person.

Byford hopes to staff up the subway platforms to assist riders directly as the TTC moves to electronic fare collection in the next two to three years, eliminating the role of fare collectors. In the meantime, group station managers are responsible for everything in their group of stations, from cleanliness to emergency readiness.

That means detail. When an exit sign is turned on, that exit has to be open, says Byford. In the Eaton Centre, for example, some doors may close earlier than others. It’s important that the signs pointing to those exits aren’t lit up once the doors are locked. “At King’s Cross, people were sent in good faith up a corridor that was found to be locked. By the time they came back, a fireball had exploded up the escalator and they were incinerated.”

From station foreman, Byford was promoted to duty station manager at Paddington and then to group station manager, overseeing 11 stations out of Harrow on the Hill in Northwest London. He had some success driving down employee absenteeism and improving customer service in many of the same “quick win” strategies that he’s adopted in Toronto — improvements to cleanliness, access to management for staff and customers.

Then his boss decided Byford needed more Section 12 experience. Section 12 comprises the fire safety regulations that govern the London Underground. Byford was offered a choice of locations to acquire that experience. He picked the most challenging one, King’s Cross.

At the time, King’s Cross vied with Victoria as the busiest station in the Tube. It was congested, and its downtown location meant it was frequented by drug addicts and prostitutes. The previous manager had been a hard-line authoritarian. Station staff morale had plunged as absenteeism soared.

It was an irresistible challenge for Byford. “But I was aware that of all the stations on the Tube, you’ve got to get it right,” he says. Fires in the London Underground normally attracted the same kind of resignation as the daily “smoke-at-track-level” announcements on the TTC. But at King’s Cross, any reference to fire would see the press, as well as Tube management, descend on the station. The London fire department would frequently turn up unannounced to inspect the station, which had about 100 rooms housing everything from switches to escalator machines to lunch tables.

Byford, who held a master key, would randomly open a few of those rooms each day looking for any potential fire contraventions. “I had very good station supervisors,” he recalls. “I motivated them but made it very clear that we would not and could not get a contravention of the fires safety regs. I never did get a Section 12 contravention.”

King’s Cross, which has undergone a massive expansion and renovation in the past decade, is now London’s busiest station. Byford says his time there “really taught me about the concept of due diligence and guilty knowledge. If you know something, you’ve got to do something about it. Due diligence is basically making sure you’ve done everything possible to take the risk down to as low a level as is reasonably practical.”

4. Being Andy

The commuter rush has barely cleared on this bitterly cold February morning when Andy Byford dashes up to a waiting camera crew on the Bay station platform. He is shooting a YouTube video with the TTC’s executive director of corporate communications, Brad Ross.

This one, about the abandoned “ghost” stations beneath Bay and Queen, is a lighter installment in a series of video explainers for system improvements and service interruptions. Byford says it’s worth his time because it helps humanize the transit system. “(The TTC) was seen as this faceless bureaucracy, very much a humourless organization.”

Andy Byford, left, and Brad Ross, the TTC’s head of corporate communications, make a video (Tess Kalinowski/Toronto Star)

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What he doesn’t say is that if riders are putting a face on the TTC these days, the one most likely to come to mind is Byford’s own. “He’s a brilliant communicator,” says Joan Taylor, Byford’s chief of staff, who is on a secondment from city manager Joe Pennachetti’s staff. “It’s one of his greatest strengths. For someone so young, he’s really a mature leader who resonates with people both internally and externally.”

A respected bureaucrat, Taylor liked the look of Byford but had never met him when she applied for the TTC job. She requested the position be made a secondment because she wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from the turbulent TTC, and it meant that Byford would have a chance to test-drive what was a newly created role.

Taylor says her new boss gives the same genuine attention to the mechanics at the TTC’s maintenance and repair “Harvey Shops” as to the city councillors and civic power players who call on him.

It’s a quality that engenders fierce loyalty, says his former boss, London Underground managing director Mike Brown. As a junior manager, Byford would arouse some skepticism among older staff members on the Tube. “By the time he moved on, which was inevitably because he’d been promoted, they were all literally mourning his departure,” continues the Irish-born head of the London subway, which carries about 4 million people a day. “There were grown men in tears — that’s stiff, sort of anally retentive English people.”

Colleagues describe Byford as easy to relate to. He likes to go for a Friday after-work beer — a “swifty” or “sesh,” as Upfold calls it — with some of his team or his brothers-in-law. Beer is Byford’s favoured libation, and he goes for what he calls “proper beer, not poncy, fizzy lager” — local brews such as Bellwoods, Steam Whistle, Amsterdam and Mill Street. His preferred drink at one of his haunts, Rebel House, is Conductor’s Craft Ale, made by Junction Craft Brewing.

A passionate sports fan, he also likes to cheer for the local team wherever he lives. Last year, Byford had season tickets for Toronto FC; this year, it’s the Argos. A framed shirt of his beloved Plymouth Argyle football team has pride of place in his office. Behind the desk there’s a signed shirt for the South Sydney Rabbitohs, the rugby team owned by actor Russell Crowe that Byford cheered during the time he lived there.

His own sport is running. He does about 5 kilometres every other day. Former TTC chair Karen Stintz, something of a fanatical runner herself, admits she lost a bottle of Plymouth gin in a bet she could beat Byford in the Yonge Street 10 K last year. He came in about two minutes ahead.

Since coming to Toronto, Byford’s energy and enthusiasm have been evident. He’s been everywhere. Union Station floods, Byford’s on the scene. Overflowing subway platforms on New Year’s Eve, the CEO is making PA announcements. Collector shot at Dupont station, he’s consoling the family before meeting with the press. New signage at Bloor station, there’s Byford thanking the volunteers who helped with the launch.

His signature smooth pate is so familiar that even a manager at Loblaws addresses him by name, asking if “Mr. Byford” has found everything he needs at the grocery store.

“When he’s on the system he’s a rock star,” gushes TTC event planner Mary Leo-Oliver. That’s an exaggeration. But at a recent meet-the-manager outing, in which TTC execs go to stations to greet riders and answer their questions, commuters are lined up three deep to speak to the system’s top man. Byford even converses in French with one rider who wonders why the TTC doesn’t impose the same business transit tax as Paris. He assures another that he would be delighted to arrange a tour of transit control for a family member who happens to be a TTC fan.

While he’s out on the system, a rider approaches him to complain about an incident with a collector. Byford takes the time to listen politely even though the customer can’t even remember some key details of the incident he claims occurred only 20 minutes earlier.

The video shoot is the second task of the day for the head of the TTC. He has been up since 5 a.m. to speak to an employee group about the TTC’s five-year corporate plan, launched last year. Standard in many companies, it’s the first of its kind at the TTC. But it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on if employees don’t know about it, he says. That’s why he’s personally attended 82 staff meetings to tell employees what the plan means to both riders and themselves. Byford is promising 13,000 employees and 1.7 million daily riders a TTC revival once the system has made good on the 100 commitments set out in that plan.

Besides cracking down on fare cheaters and providing more cell and Wi-Fi service in the system, they include:

An overhaul of the TTC’s safety and evacuation plans and a promise to reduce rider and employee injuries.

A reduction in subway crews from two operators to one and the replacement of subway station collectors with “highly trained, proactive” station supervisors.

The use of more “secret shoppers” in addition to the quarterly customer surveys to provide a clearer picture of what the TTC rider experience looks like.

The addition of more fare-enforcement staff.

The introduction of electronic payments with the Presto card and new fare-by-time and fare-by-distance policies.

More capacity with new vehicles and new lines.

The TTC has been holding employee town halls to let staff know about the plan and their role in delivering on the commitments. Byford tells workers that the TTC’s culture is changing, that they have a right to feel “cherished and developed.” That means giving them everything from promotion opportunities to improved working conditions. Byford promises staff that their washrooms will be renovated and cleaned in the same way the public washrooms in TTC stations have been modernized and sanitized.

“I’ve got a nice washroom, why shouldn’t you,” he tells employees, promising them a similar overhaul within two years.

The five-year plan is a good one, says Mitch Stambler, the TTC’s head of Strategy and Service Planning. But it’s not like the TTC has never done any planning. In fact, it has had dozens of strategies. He rhymes them off: the Transit City light-rail plan, the Transit City bus plan, the TTC’s ridership growth strategy, a green plan for sustainability, a safety plan. “We just never wove it all together. Andy took the vision we have to knit it all together.”

Byford has plowed a road through his already-packed schedule to personally attend 82 of the 83 employee town halls, including those for overnight workers that don’t start until after 11 p.m. He will stop at home for dinner in the evening before heading out to another town hall at the Roncesvalles car house. It will be 1:30 a.m. before he drops into bed.

He admits that Alison, his wife of 20 years, thinks he is overdoing it with the town hall thing. A fiercely private person who works as an IT project manager, she refused to be interviewed. They have no children.

The pair met in London when she was working as a temp at the Tube and happened to be typing a letter for Byford’s secondment to another department. They shared a passion for British pubs, beer and travel, and within a year they became engaged. Naturally, he proposed on a train.

They married in Ottawa, where they hired a repurposed double-decker to transport guests to their wedding. Byford tells people that his dad, an inveterate bus spotter, took more pictures of the bus than the bride. The couple is extremely close. He has no problem telling journalists that Alison is his rock. They still see one another off at the airport. Once, Byford got up at 4 a.m. to give his wife a proper send-off.

Andy Byford boards the double-decker bus used to transport guests to his wedding in Ottawa in 1994

Although they belong to a car-sharing program, they don’t own a car. Byford never has. He uses the TTC for both personal and professional travel.

His enthusiasm for his work extends well beyond his well-documented penchant for picking up litter on the system. For example, thousands of letters flow each year from the CEO’s office — congratulations for years of service, condolence notes to the spouses of former employees. You name the occasion, the TTC marks it. Where his predecessors relied on an electronic signature, Byford puts his own pen to each page in the inches-thick stacks of correspondence. Conversely, he is the first TTC chief to have a computer in his office, although Webster was no Luddite and carried a BlackBerry.

Byford’s schedule is so packed — he holds three different executive group meetings every week, plus a weekly performance snapshot meeting in which managers stand during a 20-minute review of everything from employee absenteeism to bus schedules — that lunch is frequently out of the question.

On a mid-February morning Byford begins his day with an 8:30 a.m. executive meeting. That’s followed by a performance snapshot and then a one-on-one to give one of his managers good news. Gary Shortt, who has been acting chief operating officer for more than four months, is being given the position permanently. The brief congratulatory handshake immediately gives way to a discussion of the work ahead.

The CEO then sprints off for another meeting, this one with City Manager Joe Pennachetti. Scrolling through his emails at the elevator, Byford would love a drink of water but that will have to wait.

Out on the system, Byford’s insistence on greeting every employee he passes can make for slow progress. The morning of the video shoot, Ross and the camera team wait while Byford greets a klatch of uniformed transit workers. He returns having gleaned the latest rumour circulating among the staff. “Apparently I’ve banned facial hair,” he says with a chuckle.

It’s ridiculous but not the most absurd bit of gossip. There is a persistent rumour that he is already preparing to leave the TTC. There have been job offers from other cities. One day he might like to work in New York, and he won’t rule out returning to London for the right position. But for now, he’s anxious to prove he can turn the TTC around.

The other stubborn bit of gossip is that Byford is here to privatize the TTC. He thinks that rumour is an offshoot of the decision to start contracting out some TTC cleaning and garbage collection last year. It was a move for which he makes no apologies, and he repeatedly points out that not a single TTC worker was laid off as a result. “If I came into this job and said to the politicians, ‘I’m not going to look at making this company more efficient,’ I’d be on the first plane back to Heathrow,” he says.

The confrontational president of the TTC workers’ union praises Byford’s energy. His eagerness to listen appears genuine, says Bob Kinnear. But he is skeptical of the outsider’s grasp of the TTC’s culture. “He’s walking around making a lot of promises to people. I think some of those are things he’s not going to be able to fulfill. He’s got the ball and he’s running with it.” But, he adds, “I think he believes he’s carrying the ball further than he actually is right now . . . I don’t think the messaging is being funnelled down the ladder to some of his managers.”

The union head is referring to Byford’s less punitive approach to employee discipline. The CEO is adamant that the TTC’s management style has to change. “This old boys’ network, excessive use of discipline, hard-line rigid approach, retribution against people who speak up cannot continue,” Byford says.

Everyone at the TTC, including Kinnear and Byford, has a story about transit workers getting the wrong end of the stick. In Kinnear’s version, it’s a female operator who was recently fired for eating a sandwich at work. When an investigation showed the employee wasn’t actually operating a vehicle while eating and she was working overtime to help out the company, management was forced to apologize and reinstate her.

Byford recalls an incident early in his tenure in which a highly commended subway collector was suspended for dozing off or reading a newspaper in his booth (Byford doesn’t remember the specifics). Both are against the rules. The discipline process escalated until it was clear the collector would be sacked. “I shouldn’t have intervened but I did,” says Byford. It would have been a different matter if the employee was a constant source of complaint or a rule breaker. All this individual needed, the CEO says, was a discreet warning that it must not happen again. “But no, we went straight for the nuclear option and some of that still goes on . . . The trouble is the damage is already done. A guy who loved the TTC now hates the TTC, or he certainly did for a while.”

Byford strives to be fair and thorough. He arrived at Sydney RailCorp when it was in the midst of a highly inflammatory review of the company’s more than 300 stations. It was the first time in years that anyone had looked at the distribution of employees, and it was immediately evident that some small, low-traffic stations had far more staff than bigger, busier locations.

The geography of the system was enormous, with some stations up to four hours away from Sydney. Byford visited every one. With only a couple of exceptions, he got off the trains and introduced himself to the station workers. When it came to negotiating staffing with the union, Byford had no trouble making up his own mind about what was appropriate. “The one thing the union reps struggled with,” he says, “was that I bothered to do the hard yard.”

5. Speaking truth to power

Gary Webster wasn’t the first TTC head to leave because of politics. His predecessor, Rick Ducharme, quit five years earlier because he was fed up with interference by the chair of the day, councillor Howard Moscoe.

Andy Byford has no illusions that the same issue that brought down Webster — Toronto’s obsessive transit debate about subways versus LRT — could cut short his own tenure. He’s already raised eyebrows among some city councillors and LRT supporters over his support of a subway to replace the Scarborough RT. But Byford has always qualified that support by saying that the projected ridership on the line would be at the upper end of LRT capacity or the lower end of recommended subway ridership.

Now, with Mayor Rob Ford campaigning for re-election on a similar subway platform — only this time he wants to convert LRT plans on Finch W. and Sheppard E. to subways — Byford can already see what the next four years might look like. He’s got numbers to support his position on the Scarborough subway. But the projections for subway ridership simply aren’t there on Sheppard, and some transit experts think the ridership on Finch barely justifies an LRT.

While Byford’s reviews have been mostly positive at city hall, many continue to wait to see what happens beyond the initial honeymoon. Minnan-Wong, the councillor who helped take down Webster, stands by that decision. “It was absolutely the right thing to do,” he says, adding that Byford is a much better transit chief. But evaluating him isn’t straightforward. “It’s not necessarily about what Andy does. He’s doing an admirable job with the resources he has.” What’s not yet clear, and may never be, is what Byford would do with the transit system in a less fiscally constrained environment.

Left-wing Councillor Joe Mihevc, who spent nine years on the TTC board before Ford came to power, admits he’s “aching” to return. That could happen if the conservative Ford loses this year’s election. As soon as there’s a new mayor, Mihevc believes, the TTC should reclaim the Finch and Sheppard LRTs. The provincially funded projects are currently under the control of Metrolinx, the government’s Toronto-area transportation agency.

“Metrolinx is swamped,” says Mihevc. “The TTC has time and capacity to undertake those projects and should be allowed to do that. That’s got to be a challenge for (Byford).” But Mihevc concedes that is a political challenge, too, a job for the TTC chair.

While he’s not a politician, there’s no question Byford operates in a political arena. It’s a forum in which he still has to prove himself, according to Mihevc. That won’t happen until Toronto public servants, the TTC CEO included, feel free to speak truth to power. “No one at city hall does not feel the pressure of perhaps being at the end of the mayor’s assault,” says Mihevc.

“Andy’s moment will not be in this term of council. It will be in the next term of council, when he will feel comfortable feeling professional. At that point, it will be up to the TTC chief “to give council (and the province) some unpleasant messages that it needs to hear around operating funding to the TTC.”

Byford is aware of the criticism. But, he warns, speaking truth to power isn’t about supporting any political position, including that of the mayor’s opponents. “People think (the mayor) is my boss — he’s not,” says Byford, who reports to the chair of the TTC. Councillor Maria Augimeri took that position in February when Stintz resigned to focus on her mayoral run.

Byford says he’s met Ford less than a dozen times, including a few occasions when the mayor asked for briefings, particularly on TTC budget requests. In the most recent round, Byford says, the mayor challenged him on the need for the TTC to hire 479 new positions this year — staff required to provide more service for the TTC’s growing ridership. “I went in and explained that to him. We agreed to disagree.”

Over the past 20 years, the TTC’s workforce has increased 18 per cent while service has expanded 27 per cent and ridership has risen by 32 per cent. After two years of cuts, the TTC this year received an $11 million increase on its city operating subsidy, which covers $428 million of the $1.6 billion budget. Byford and the TTC chair are heading a task force to try and achieve what the city has so far failed to do: Persuade senior governments to make a contribution.

The capital side of the TTC budget — the money that pays for vehicles, equipment, repairs and maintenance — remains a staggering challenge. The 10-year plan calls for $9 billion, 70 per cent of it for expenses in the final five years. A $2.7 billion shortfall means many critical items remain unfunded, including accessibility improvements, 59 Wheel-Trans buses, 60 low-floor Bombardier streetcars, 372 subway car replacements, 135 buses and a new bus garage.

Ford also challenged the TTC’s request for a customer information system (CIS), the communications tool that helps transit control centres communicate with operators. It would be a $90 million expense over three years, an expenditure that, according to Upfold, is the only way the TTC can significantly improve its streetcar and bus service.

In the short term, the TTC will try and increase bus and streetcar reliability by putting more supervisors on the street to prevent surface vehicle delays, bunching and turning back streetcars before the end of the route. That will improve performance by maybe 2 per cent. “But there won’t be a fundamental change until we have CIS with a modern system,” says Upfold.

The TTC’s CIS was “absolutely top of the line” in 1973, he said. But most other transit agencies have moved two or three generations ahead in the technology since then. With the current TTC communication system, when a supervisor detects a delay up the bus or streetcar line, transit control sends a 64-character-maximum message to 10 or 15 operators up the route. Each operator has to acknowledge receipt of the message before the next batch can be sent to operators further up the line. When you consider that the TTC typically has about 1,500 buses on the road during a weekday rush, it’s easy to see how challenging it is to keep the service running on time. “We’ve had money in (the TTC’s budget request) for a CIS replacement for a decade,” says Upfold. Each time, it loses out to other projects competing for the TTC’s scarce capital dollars.

The small bump in its city subsidy and its commitment to the CIS seem all the more remarkable against the backdrop of Ford’s mayoralty. The city’s chief magistrate seldom misses an opportunity to express his disdain for streetcars and LRTs. Under his administration and Stintz’s leadership, the TTC opted to run fewer, more crowded buses. “We intentionally — the city and the TTC — made a decision to make our service worse to save $10 million or whatever it was that year (2012),” says customer service head Upfold.

Byford takes pains to be fair about the mayor. Asked if he thinks Ford is genuinely interested in improving public transit, Byford says, “Well he has a passion for subways.” But “at the end of the day, by (Ford’s) own admission, he doesn’t use the TTC. I don’t see how you can really understand the challenge unless you use the system.”

The one time Byford was truly angered by Ford was in November 2012, when a TTC bus full of passengers was emptied and rerouted to pick up the Don Bosco high school football team, which Ford coached until the school terminated the relationship. The TTC chief was at city hall when he received a cellphone call from the mayor wanting to know why the bus, requested by Toronto police, was taking so long to reach the playing field.

Byford had to speak to transit control to figure out what the mayor was talking about. As the incident attracted increasing outrage over the paying customers who were kicked off a bus, Byford says he “was sort of squirming at being drawn deeper and deeper into a hole that was not of my own making . . . It looked like I was somehow complicit in that I had no idea what the hell was going on.”

Ford, he says, likes dealing with CEOs. He treats Pennachetti, TCHC head Gene Jones and Toronto Hydro president Anthony Haines similarly. “Things that I think are details of minutiae, his default is to go straight to the CEO. That’s his prerogative. He’s the mayor. In a way I don’t argue against it because I’m a believer in accountability, and ultimately I’m accountable for the TTC.”

6. Plan B

Andy Byford loves to travel. From the Summer Palace in Beijing to a trans-Atlantic cruise on the QE2, he has an impressive list of destinations he’s seen and others he would like to visit.

His parents used to take him and his sister to France for summer holidays and he always expected to marry a foreigner. The only surprise was that he chose a Canadian rather than a Frenchwoman.

Byford was born east of London on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent, and spent his teen years in Winchester. But Plymouth, on the south coast of Devon, was the setting for his early boyhood, and he considers it his hometown. He cites a happy childhood and his beloved Plymouth Argyle football team among the attachments.

But it’s more than that. “I have a burning passion and love of that city,” he says without a hint of self-consciousness. There’s something indomitable about Plymouth, which happens to be the largest naval base in Western Europe. “It’s almost a siege mentality,” he says. “I feel it’s a city that has tremendous spirit that is completely disregarded by government. They don’t see any votes in it and it’s been completely shafted by governments over the years.” Byford has fantasies about returning as the city’s CEO or a councillor.

Plymouth’s lovely Victorian downtown was decimated during World War II and rebuilt in the 1950s. “People say, ‘Oh it’s a concrete dump.’ It isn’t a concrete dump. This is actually Portland stone,” he says of the material that has also been used in edifices such as St. Paul’s Cathedral, Buckingham Palace and the United Nations headquarters. “These are beautiful 1950s buildings and it’s got the most (historically) listed buildings outside London of any British city.

“This is Plymouth Sound,” he says, pointing to a picture on his desk. “I’ve already decided when I die I will be cremated and have my ashes spread in Plymouth Sound.”

Although he loves Canada, Byford makes no apologies for his fierce British patriotism. In pride of place under the glass on his desk is the front page of a newspaper bearing a large image of Margaret Thatcher, part of an obituary package last April. Byford calls her a hero. Broke at the end of the 1970s, Britain was “begging from the International Monetary Fund.” Then, in 1982, Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands and Thatcher took the country to war in a development that Byford saw as standing up to a great wrong. “Rightly or wrongly,” he says, “whoever owns the Falklands, you can’t just invade.

“I remember going to stand on Plymouth Hoe (a public space that overlooks the sea) and I could see the warships going out immaculate. Immaculate.” When the ships returned the whole city turned out to watch them from Plymouth Hoe, including Byford.

“The sad thing was all the ships didn’t come back,” he says with obvious emotion. “A couple of Devonport ships were sunk. The ships came in covered in rust, they had bullet holes in them, holes where missiles had gone through them.”

It’s the Plymouth connection that helps make him sanguine about the politics and perils of running the TTC, says Byford. He and Alison own a flat there overlooking the sea. Byford calls it their “bolt-hole,” a refuge. “If the worst thing happened here and I got sacked or I just thought I can’t stand this any longer, it’s nice to know I could just go there and hide.”

That seems unlikely for a man who’s spent a career testing his performance before the public. In 1998, when he was already working at the Tube, Byford and four school friends opened a pub in London’s Barbican district. It was before Skye TV was widely available and sports bars had multiple big-screen TVs. The school chums, beer lovers all, saw an opportunity.

View of the Plymouth waterfront from Byford’s flat

“The most gratifying thing was to come out the tube station, rounding the corner and see our bar absolutely packed. It wasn’t thinking, ‘Oh, ching, ching.’ It was thinking, ‘These people could have gone anywhere but they chose to come to our bar.’ It was such fun and such a great feeling we must be doing something right.”

Byford says he’s a perfectionist and admits to occasionally being obsessive. “I constantly reflect on, are we going too fast or, more often, are we not going fast enough, is the renaissance stalling?” He knows he won’t always get it right at the TTC. “There will be knock-backs,” he says, referring to times when the service goes horribly wrong.

“This is indeed a big, challenging job,” he wrote in response to a rider who complained recently about crowding on the subway. Byford conceded that capacity gains from new, bigger buses, streetcars and subway trains are almost immediately swallowed up by ridership growth.

But, he continued,” I actually love and I relish the challenge of converting our critics over time and in getting the TTC back to being a network that the city can be proud of. That said . . . this is the most political environment that I have ever countered (sic) and that certainly adds to the complexity of getting things done. I am also dealing with the consequences of years of underfunding and deferral of critical decisions.”

He closed the letter with a promise: “I am quite determined to give you and your fellow riders a transformed experience. We will get there.”

Tess Kalinowski has been reporting on transit and transportation for the Toronto Star since 2007. She joined the Star in 2000, working as an assignment editor and education reporter before taking on the transportation beat. Previously, Kalinowski was the assistant managing editor of the London Free Press. Most days she commutes by GO train from the Mississauga home she shares with her teenaged daughter, Olivia.