Adam Giambrone, the new chairman of the Toronto Transit Commission, recently asked the same bloggers whom the TTC has shit on for years for their suggestions on how to improve the TTC’s embarassment of a web site. Several blogs solicited opinions from their readers. My comment was that the TTC doesn’t need just a new website, it needs taste:

Instead of relying on people who comment on blogs to tell it how its site sucks — as if its undesign and utter usability aren’t immediately obvious to anyone who has ever visited it — the TTC should hire a someone to head up a Design department.

This person will be in charge of formulating standards for TTC advertising, route/schedule information posters, website design, and station/vehicle signage. The person will oversee graphic/accessibility/architectural design related to all advertising, media, signage, station and vehicle renovation/construction. He or she will have the power to institute design standards and make sure that the TTC presents a consistent brand image everywhere and that all communication from the TTC is attractive, easy to use, accessible, and consistent.

If that doesn’t happen, this will just be a one-off, and like all one-offs will end up decaying into another sloppy mess. The TTC needs design everywhere, not just on its web site.

(An e-mail from the man who started the site proves that nobody at the TTC knows anything other than how to sign no-tender contracts with Bombardier.)

It was in that context that a Marc Weisblott, a journalist and Toronto blogger of some note, solicited my opinion for a piece in the Globe and Mail, asking what I thought of the TTC’s consultation with bloggers. I was quoted on page A11 of today’s paper (any typos are mine):

Despite the plaudits for Mr. Giambrone — whose energy level combined with the tech savvy of a 29-year-old, seems essential toward rehabilitating the terminally institutional image of the TTC — not everyone is buying into the sudden outbreak of perestroika.

David Ellis, a pseudonymous blogger who posts under the handle “thickslab,” wonders why this kind of consulation never emerged until now.

“Through its actions, the TTC wshows a deep contempt for aesthetics,” he says.

“Why don’t they replace ceiling panels or choose tiles that match? They don’t want to listen to anyone outside because they’re convinced they know what they’re doing. They think that they’re running the system well and that what they need is more money, and there’s nothing they can do without more money.”

For those who are interested, here’s what I wrote to Marc (slightly edited):

This consultation? It’s good. I think it’s a great thing that Adam Giambrone is asking for input, but it concerns me that it has taken years of cries from TTC fans and a new TTC chairman to get such a limited amount of consultation and such a limited admission that all is not well.

I don’t believe his kind of one-off consultation will do much to change the culture of the TTC, which I see as the problem. A good place to read about this is Steve Munro’s blog at www.stevemunro.ca; he helped save streetcars in Toronto 30 years ago. From the outside, the process for everything looks pretty much like this: engineers who run the TTC decide on a course of action, then present it to the commission or to the public. If there’s any resistance to their ideas, they fight it as much as they can and do the minimum possible to appease their critics while preserving as much of what they want as they can. It’s inertia and arrogance — TTC engineers know what’s best and they won’t let anyone else tell them how to run things. If you want examples, take a look at the St. Clair streetcar, the new subway trains with the proposal for perimeter seating, the Spacing subway buttons that the TTC rejected, the Torontoist TTC T-shirt designs that are ten times better than the TTC’s. The list goes on and on, and that’s not even mentioning their outright attacks on fans, like the legal threats against the creator of the anagram map. The love that Toronto transit fans have for the TTC is clearly unrequited.

Joe Clark’s piece on the signage trial at St. George is linked from that posting on my blog in which I chastized fantasy map creators.

But the problem is deeper than one simple signage trial. Through its actions the TTC shows a deep contempt for aesthetics. Why don’t they replace ceiling panels or choose tiles that match? Why do they design a poor web site and leave it that way for years? Why haven’t they listened when people have complained about this over the years? It’s the corporate culture: they don’t want to listen to anyone outside because they’re convinced they know what they’re doing. They know that they’re running the system well, and that what they need is more money and there’s nothing they can do without more money.

The fact that it take a new incoming TTC chairman to finally open the TTC’s door a tiny crack to new ideas tells me that some serious structural and organizational change is needed at the TTC. I think the lack of concern about what people outside the organization want is symptomatic of a deep rot. I saw that in my previous workplace, a company which has not turned a profit for years and which has been “just about to turn the corner” for just as long. It’s so easy for organizations to fall into that kind of thinking, especially when they have a glorious past like the TTC does. I think Adam Giambrone means well and has nothing but the best intentions, but a few small consulations won’t fix things. There need to be organizational changes.

Does this mean I’m a celebrity now?