An outside panel of customer service advisers will recommend a sweeping overhaul of the TTC’s corporate culture when it releases its long-awaited report Monday.

The report will contain about 75 recommendations addressing issues ranging from quick low-cost fixes such as messages on the front of the bus telling riders it’s full to revamped hiring practices, which could take years to filter through the system, according to Toronto Star sources.

Produced by a 10-member panel of volunteers, the findings amount to an overhaul in the way the TTC views and treats passengers — what commission vice-chair Joe Mihevc calls “a cultural change.”

“Torontonians will hear they’ve been heard. The recommendations speak to what passengers are thinking or feeling,” said Mihevc (Ward 21, St. Paul’s).

The report follows a disastrous year for the TTC: Adam Giambrone, the commission’s chair, dropped out of the city’s mayoral race following a sex scandal, riders lashed out over a fare hike that led to token hoarding, photos of sleeping subway collectors outraged the city and Danforth-area homeowners became furious over plans to expropriate houses.

The TTC intends to change its approach to customer service the same way it revolutionized its safety and state-of-good-repair procedures following the 1995 Russell Hill collision of two subway trains that killed three people, Mihevic said.

Some of the proposed fixes — such as using the bus route displays to tell riders on approach when the vehicle is full — or adding more and better maps to stops and stations, are obvious, low-cost improvements.

But revamped staff training and hiring practices, to better assess the customer-service aptitude of new employees, could take longer to entrench in the 12,000-member workforce.

The panel is also recommending cleaning up the assortment of handwritten signs on collector booths, with the possible help of a point-of-purchase consultant.

Some of the panel findings are already underway, including electronic payment options, more effective and audible communications throughout the system and a more responsive customer complaints process.

Panelist and Spacing magazine publisher Matt Blackett says the TTC can catch up and become a 21st century system, but it needs investment.

“They’ve gone 15 years without any kind of consolidated way-finding system. Now it’s going to cost $15 million,” he said.

Speaking to the Star last month, panel chair Steve O’Brien said, “A lot isn’t going to surprise people. At the same time, I think there’s going to be a lot more pressure on people in the TTC because you’ve got this independent group of eyes that are looking at it and saying, ‘You can improve things and make it better if you do this.’”

In the meantime, transit union head Bob Kinnear says much of the public’s anger toward the TTC has subsided. A series of union-organized town halls helped show the public that transit workers aren’t to blame for many of the system’s shortcomings, he said.

He expects the panel’s recommendations will express the same concerns workers have been discussing for years, said Kinnear, who thinks the report’s release before the fall city elections is designed to help councillors on the transit commission.

But he says workers aren’t threatened by the prospect of changes.

“Any time you make a step forward in a positive direction, if it’s beneficial to the rider it’s going to be beneficial to us,” said bus driver Robert Culling, the only TTC employee on the advisory panel.

At the Mount Dennis division where he works, TTC workers have formed their own customer service committee and, with the help of Spacing magazine, created buttons that say, “Customer service begins with me.”

Put service above museum plan, Smitherman tells TTC

Mayoral candidate George Smitherman wants councillors on the Toronto Transit Commission to “get a grip on reality,” and scrap plans for a transit museum and a new headquarters at York Mills and Yonge St.

On Monday, the TTC is expected to approve a plan to set up a non-profit board that would raise funds for a 1,735-square-metre transit interpretive centre.

The museum would probably be housed in the TTC’s proposed new York Mills headquarters, also expected to be approved Monday.

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The TTC has already spent about $85,000 to get a consultant’s advice on how to set up the museum. Transit commissioners are expected to approve a further $238,000 for consulting and engineering work, to look at other potential sites such as an old bus garage on Danforth Ave. that has since been deemed unsuitable.

Smitherman said Friday that the transit commission needs to take a hard look at its priorities and a visitor centre shouldn’t be on the list.

“The priorities I hear about is state-of-good repair and disgusting state of cleanliness and inconsistency in terms of the attitudes that are coming back from staff,” he said. “Rather than blowing our brains out on a study for a museum maybe they should keep those dollars in abeyance as part of the response to the (customer service) panel’s work," he said.