Talking Headways Podcast: The Passion Problem in Public Transit

This week on Talking Headways is Part 2 of our discussion with Reece Martin in Toronto at the Mpact Transit + Community Conference. We discuss the media picking projects apart, the gap between talent and passion in transit agencies, high speed rail and the threat of AVs to bad transit.

Listeners can hit play on the audio player embedded below, study an AI-generated transcript, or read the edited excerpt further down.

Jeff Wood: I was reading through a lot of your posts, and I came upon this idea that after we build something, the people that built it don’t wanna talk about it, or they don’t want to talk if it went over-budget, they don’t want to talk about the things that they did wrong. They want to find better ways to do it, but they don’t want to have this public inquiry about what happened. I was curious what your thoughts were on that.

Reece Martin: It’s a problem I’ve definitely identified in Toronto and it exists in the US as well, obviously. There will be a project that just gets slammed in the media for years and years, and then it’s done. It’s surprising to me, in Toronto, because we actually are pretty well-governed by North American standards, though maybe not by international standards.

But I’m a little surprised that with the Eglinton Crosstown, this tunneled light rail line that famously delayed for a very long time, there wasn’t a public inquiry. But there was an inquiry in Ottawa. Ottawa also built a light rail system and it had a bunch of problems and there was an inquiry, but you just don’t see that as much.

Look at Seattle. It’s building a lot of stuff, it’s very expensive, and a lot of projects have a lot of problems. It would be healthy to have some sort of legislated process where there is a review. I think there are a lot of reasons this stuff doesn’t happen. 

Part of it, and this is sadly pretty cynical, is that in the public transit industry in North America, you’re looked upon with great skepticism if you’re very interested in it. It’s like, “Why do you care so much about this stuff? Wqhat are you doing? Why are you asking these questions? What are you, why are you…? You go to a place like Japan and they really embrace the sort of enthusiasm for public transit.

And I get it — it’s overbearing, it’s tiring. But if you’re really passionate and you’re a great engineer and you live in Austin, are you going to work on a transit project or are you going to work for Tesla? And unfortunately, I think the reality is you’re probably gonna go work for Tesla or you’re gonna go to San Francisco and work for Apple or work for Google, and help extract more dollars out of every citizen.

Whereas in China, you would probably go work at the high-speed rail authority or you’d go work at one of 50 cities building a huge subway system. Because it’s competitive — there’s so many cities doing it at once.

This is a real problem. I don’t know how to solve it. The passionate people, for example: I have basically never worked for a transit authority in my life, and I think that’s bad. You’d think, in the ideal world, someone who’s really passionate about this stuff would be brought into the tent.

And if you’re the Prime Minister of Canada, or you’re a leader of a country, and you’re looking and you think, “How do we get the people who are really invested in this going right working on this stuff?” And it doesn’t happen.

The same is true for the Marron Institute in New York City. It’s great that they’re doing that work, but shouldn’t they be working for the MTA and just solving these problems instead? It’s actually really valuable for the whole world that they’re doing the research, and I love it and I promote it a lot. But if you’re Mamdani or you’re Hochul, it’s clear that the actual best thing is for those people to be working on subway expansion so that New York isn’t ossified and stuck with the subway network they built 100 years ago.

But they’re not doing that. The institutions are not very well-equipped. They’re arrogant and they turn up their noses at people who are really passionate. Alon Levy sometimes releases articles at very odd hours of the night. It’s like people who work at Apple. A lot of those people have crazy working hours.

A lot of that is because they’re paid very highly. But a lot of it is because those people really care about their work. And transit would benefit by getting more people like that to work on transit projects. I just don’t think it exists. There isn’t a bridge.

There are a lot of passionate people in transit. I meet a lot of them. But I meet a lot more passionate people who aren’t working in it. Or I meet people who are in other industries that say, “I would love to get involved in the transit industry,” and they don’t really see a way. And I think if they got involved, they might be like, “Oh.”

A lot of people I know are really smart. They work at a transit agency, they get frustrated, and they leave and go work in private consultancy or they work in a totally different industry because they’re frustrated. And so that’s clearly part of the problem. It’s a human resources problem.