As she makes her way through St. George subway station, Heather Fraser can't help but feel something is missing - something other than the ceiling tiles, that is.
Or a Smart Card to let her bypass the surly fare collector.
Or a collector, period. This one has vanished, leaving a hand-scrawled sign asking customers to "Please pay your fare and go in."
No, it's more than these things. What's missing to Ms. Fraser, a business-design guru at the Rotman School of Management, is the simple satisfaction of a basic public service, pleasantly rendered.
"It works, but something's not right," Ms. Fraser says, unwittingly coining an apt slogan for the Toronto Transit Commission, once known as The Better Way.
TTC users have had much to complain about lately. Sleeping collectors, primordial systems, gruff service, congestion, dirty stations and delays are among the shame-badges pinned to the TTC's grey-and-maroon uniform. Another was added this week when a fed-up rider posted YouTube videos of a bus driver taking languorous coffee breaks mid-route while his passengers sat idling.
Bad as its been for customers, the stakes are far higher for Toronto's image as a progressive international city.
"It's quite stark and it's quite simple," says Eric Miller, a civil engineering professor and transportation expert at the University of Toronto. "It's impossible to build a dense urban city with high quality of life without proper transit, full stop. It is not an option, it is not a frill; it is essential, and part of our problem is we don't appreciate that."
The lack of appreciation extends from the federal and provincial governments down through city hall, onto car-clogged streets and into the subway tunnels, where transit workers toil while users, armed with cellphone cameras, grow ever more dissatisfied.
When photos of snoozing fare-takers surfaced last month, TTC chairman and mayoral candidate Adam Giambrone pledged a "renewed commitment to excellence in customer service" through a special advisory panel and fast-tracking of upgrades that boost respect for riders' time. In coming months, screens at station entrances will alert passengers to delays before they get stuck waiting inside, and GPS on buses and streetcars will enable riders to find out via text message or stop-based screens when their rides will arrive.
Welcome as these things are, they are like fresh paint on a rusting car: a superficial fix that won't stop underlying decay. As long as chronic underfunding, tepid leadership, car-first attitudes and a fusty TTC work culture continue, observers say, the results will trickle down and stain the customer experience, along with Toronto's reputation.
Ms. Fraser, who has helped institutions like Princess Margaret Hospital and the Singapore government apply "design thinking" to improve the lives of their customers, could feel it during a brief subway and streetcar ride this week.
When she asked a collector to name his favourite part of his shift, he said, "Going home to be with my family."
Crippling as its problems seem, she says the TTC could benefit from a holistic rethink of the kind her Rotman team has been doing for companies since 2006.
The first step of the process is not often associated with Toronto transit workers - "empathy and deep user understanding" - but it would enable the TTC to map key problems, envision the ideal rider experience and redesign operations to suit.
"The TTC is not a bunch of subways and buses and grumpy drivers," Ms. Fraser says. "The TTC is your way to work, it's your way home, and if you understand what really matters to people, you'll realize that other things don't."
The point is not to "be better at lousy" by tinkering with ineffective systems, she says, but to "be stellar at something that's really brilliant" through entirely new ideas.
"The worst thing is to spend money where you really aren't getting at the root problem."
Of course, money is the TTC's root problem, or at least its biggest one. No major transit system in North America or Europe gets by on less government money.
"One shouldn't underestimate how important that has been," Prof. Miller says, to both the TTC's physical and mental states. "I think it's created a bunker mentality … and it has certainly impeded thinking laterally, thinking out of the box, thinking about what we can do to improve things."
No one disputes that a Smart Card fare system, seemingly in use in everywhere but Toronto, would improve the customer experience and enable the TTC to adopt distance-based fares. But it couldn't afford the $140-million it would have cost a decade ago, and it certainly can't afford the $450-million it would cost now.
Cheaper to fix is its governance, provided by a board of nine city councillors, which leaves transit vulnerable to ward politics and a persistent car-is-king mindset. A board of broadly qualified experts is worth exploring, he says.
Still, "that's not to absolve the TTC of all blame. I don't think it's any secret that the TTC has a certain corporate culture which I do think needs to be changed."
That bureaucratic, we-know-best ethos won't be easy to scrub from a 12,000-worker, mostly-union shop, but must be tackled if the TTC is serious about service. The payoff would be a more contented ridership, whose current surliness only worsens workers' drudgery, Ms. Fraser says.
"I think there's a huge opportunity in making life better for the people who have to serve the community, and it's not money; it's treating them with a little more respect, too," she says, stepping from the station into the welcome daylight on Bedford Road.
"At the end of the day, it doesn't have to be fancy and slick," she says. "I think they just need [to provide]a better experience."