(While the older boy stirs and the French toast gently sizzles...)
An idea that comes up a lot, including in this comment thread below, is that the people who run a transit system should have to use it. This is a nice idea but tricky.
The good stuff first. Obviously, it appeals to our basic sense of fairness. It's all very well to make cuts and changes and decide what the system's emphasis should be (commuters versus 24-hour service, let's say) when you don't depend on it yourself. If you rely on the system and you control it, you're going to make sure it works pretty darn well. There's also a difference between being a tourist on a transit system — taking even several bus rides a week in a good-faith effort to be familiar with the customer's perspective — and actually depending on it. When you take the same trips every single day, you see the weaknesses in the system that only turn into failures occasionally: the too-close-for-comfort connections, the empty-full-empty-full leapfrogging of two buses on the same runs, that kind of thing. If things work properly 95 per cent of the time, and you take the bus to and from work every day, something's going to blow up in your face once every two weeks. Transit tourism probably won't reveal that to you.
On the flip side, if I'm the general manager of OC Transpo and I ride the bus from my house in Orléans to work on St-Laurent Boulevard every day, you can be damned sure that the buses from Orléans to St-Laurent are going to be on time and there are going to be a lot of them. Along with the mid-day routes that connect 1500 St-Laurent to city hall at 110 Laurier West. Even if I don't make that happen, the system will most definitely arrange itself over time to make sure that my experience is a positive one. That could actually make me less cognizant of what it's like for other people, rather than more, if I have a lot of personal experience with a transit system that obviously works just great.
Practically, also, our senior transit officials and their political bosses don't ordinarily have enough hours in the day to do the business we want them to do. These people have a lot more places to be in a day than the average white-collar worker. The more time they spend in transit, so to speak, the less time they're actually working. BlackBerrys and iPhones mean that's not completely dead time, but it's not the same as being in your office having meetings or being at an important community event.
And finally, there's the unpleasant reality we have to face when we ask why we pay these people so much (Transpo GM Alain Mercier made nearly $200,000 in 2009). And it's that they have difficult jobs that require particular skills and expertise that are not common. If we want good people, the jobs we're offering them need to be attractive — well-paid and with good perks and working conditions — or else good people won't want them. We can argue about whether this transit official or that transit official is actually worth what we're paying him or her (keeping in mind that OC Transpo bosses have to work with the budget and ground rules the politicians give them), but the principle applies generally. If a job at the top of Ottawa's transit system involves spending three hours a day waiting for buses and riding on them and walking to your next meeting, it's going to be distinctly less appealing than a job at the top of some other city's transit system.
I'm not saying the idea that transit officials should have to use the service is a bad one, but it's got downsides.
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