The TTC runs in Bill Kelly’s blood.

On the day he was born, his father was driving a Queen streetcar. In the middle of his shift, he rushed to find someone to cover for him and ran up to St. Michael’s Hospital to meet his new son.

Since then, Kelly, now 52, has probably serviced the very streetcar his father was driving that day. He’s worked in vehicle maintenance for the TTC for 33 years, a job in which he continues to take deep pride.

“It’s definitely like family, and I feel a great responsibility to putting out good service and good product for the city of Toronto, as my father did,” he told the Star on a recent evening.

That lifelong bond with the TTC gives Kelly a unique perspective on a piece of one of Toronto’s trickiest puzzles. On transit, he is a “hidden expert” — an individual working on the front lines of fields that will shape the city’s future. The Star met with him and two other hidden experts inside Harvey Shop, a streetcar maintenance facility on Bathurst St.

He was joined by Jorge Lobo, a veteran streetcar driver, and Hussain Saleem, developer of the RocketMan app. All three piled into one of the TTC’s sleek new streetcars for a lively debate on how to fix Toronto’s transit mess.

Throughout March and April, the Star is speaking to hidden experts about their big ideas for transforming the city. But we need your help to track down these unsung city-builders and are accepting nominations at thestar.com/bigideas.

It’s part of a city-wide brainstorm the Star kicked off Jan. 1, when we declared 2014 the Year of the Idea. In partnership with the Martin Prosperity Institute and Evergreen CityWorks, we are featuring ideas for Toronto’s future in the paper and on thestar.com.

Here are some of our hidden experts’ standout suggestions to get Toronto moving again:

Change parking hours on main streets to reflect changing lifestyles.

Lobo, 50, has been driving a streetcar for 25 years and still loves it. “I never want to do anything else but go back and forth and be my best every day, 10 hours a day,” he said proudly.

He’s seen a lot of changes — not only in the number of passengers, but in the behaviour of passengers, too. People used to have the time to chat, but these days are more focused on their lives and their iPhones, he said.

Lifestyles have changed, too. Workers used to leave the office at 4:30, but these days are more likely to leave at 6 or 7 p.m. So, he asked: Why is parking still allowed after 6 p.m. at some spots on King Street?

“You’ve gone from two lanes to one lane of traffic,” he said. “You go on King St. at 6:30 and the traffic doesn’t move.”

Lobo suggested allowing parking on main streets after 8 p.m. only. He insisted we won’t have to go as far as banning cars on King St. during rush hour; this simple change would make a big difference.

Ban left turns on streetcar routes so streetcars don’t get stuck at red lights.

“These are small things they could do. I don’t think it would be costly. I don’t think it’s rocket science,” said Lobo.

Streetcars frequently run every three minutes. If a TTC driver is stuck at the intersection waiting for two or three cars to make a left turn, they lose the light and the streetcar behind catches up to them, he explained.

When streetcars get behind schedule, they wind up bunched together so they all arrive at stops at the same time. Drivers are forced to make the dreaded “short turns” to avert this scenario, Lobo said.

“People get upset, but if you don’t short-turn those cars, you’re going to have 10 cars going one way, 10 streetcars coming back the other way.”

Create satellite repair locations at streetcar houses to speed up repairs.

Kelly came up with this idea as a way to make sure repair workers have the parts they need to fix cars quickly. “Therefore, you would have less time lost in shipping parts around,” he said.

The TTC maintenance worker said many of the breakdowns are not preventable, given the age of the streetcars. Salt on the streets deteriorates the body of the vehicles, he added.

“Look at your own car. It’s not going 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. And yet, our vehicles are. To keep that maintenance going, it’s challenging, but a lot of us have that passion.”

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A new fleet of accessible, air-conditioned Bombardier streetcars is set to hit Spadina Ave. in the fall and will be rolled out on other routes in the coming years. Speaking inside one of the streamlined new cars, Kelly said they will solve most — but not all — of his maintenance gripes.

For example, ice on the overhead wires that slowed streetcar service to a crawl this winter will still be an issue if such a storm happens again, Kelly said. But the new streetcars will have pneumatic airlines, resolving the problem of cars stalling in the cold.

Limit the number of cars downtown.

“Wait until those condos are filled. It’s only going to get worse,” warned Kelly. With some 90,000 condo units set to be built over the next decade, the downtown core is likely to become even more traffic-clogged.

In San Paulo, Brazil, drivers are only allowed to drive on either the even days or odd days of the month, so only half the vehicles in the city are on the road per day. London has a congestion charge on vehicles operating in the central part of the city between 7 a.m. and 6 p.m.

“I honestly think that is what’s going to happen. They have to do it,” said Kelly, although our experts agreed there was little political will to impose new levies or restrictions on drivers.

“People talk, talk, but I don’t think transit is a priority in Toronto,” said Lobo. “(Politicians) still have this thing with drivers ... But in a city the size of Toronto, the amount of people that use the TTC, you should have priority.”

Share more detailed data with app developers.

Saleem, a 39-year-old computer programmer, created the free RocketMan app three years ago to help TTC users plan their journeys. It uses GPS data in buses and streetcars to map their locations in real-time.

But when a route goes out of service, the TTC posts a simple alert on its Twitter page and website, without any metadata that includes specific stop numbers. That makes it challenging and time-consuming for developers to adapt that data and inform users their bus or streetcar will not be arriving on schedule.

RocketMan uses TTC NextBus feeds to report accurate bus arrival, but changes to routes are not pushed to the NextBus feed until days later, and sometimes are never updated. Further, when NextBus goes down, it’s not possible to figure out when the service will be up again.

“I cannot improve the service. I cannot make the streetcars go faster, or have more of them run,” said Saleem. “I can just communicate that information to riders in a friendly way, and then they can manage their time in a better way.”

Build a subway station a year.

Our hidden experts have been around a while, and they’ve seen politicians make sweeping promises that never materialize. For that reason, many of their ideas were reasonable and practical.

When asked to “dream big,” Kelly replied that he supported a downtown relief line and building more subway stations throughout the city.

“I don’t think they should have ever stopped building subway stations. From the time they finished building Kennedy, they should have done a station a year,” he said. “Streetcars are my passion, but I still love subways.”