Bettering the Better Way

The Better Way

The Toronto Transit Commission — a.k.a. the TTC — is Accordion City’s public transport authority, responsible for operating a city-wide transit system comprising a subway, buses, streetcars and light rail trains. In 2005, the TTC carried about 430 million passengers to their destinations, making it the third most-used mass transit system in North America (New York’s is the most-used, followed by Mexico City’s). A long-time catchphrase used in TTC advertising promotes them as “The Better Way”, which is where the title of this post comes from.

Recently, there’s been a lot of talk about the TTC web site. It’s so bad — from both the standpoints of usefulness and aesthetics — that it’s downright embarrassing:

Actual screen capture of the TTC’s site. Click to visit the site and see the full ugliness for yourself.

A couple of weeks ago, local architect and civic-minded guy Robert Oullette wrote an article in his blog, Reading Toronto, titled How Would You Improve the TTC Web Site?. This article generated a lot of interest from the local blogosphere:

• Spacing Wire: Help improve the TTC’s website
• Torontoist: Help Make the TTC’s Website The Better Way
• BlogTO: Bloggers Help TTC Website
• Transit Toronto: Giambrone Turns to Transit Fans for Suggestions

The press also chimed in:

• National Post: Blogtown
• Globe & Mail: The TTC Gets Some Online Help

Simply put, there are a lot of people in this city who care about the TTC and have have ideas for improving both the transit system and its site.

The Meeting

Last week, I met with a group of very active people in the Toronto tech and community scenes; this meeting was captured quite nicely by Will Pate in the photograph below:

The characters in this meeting were:

• Yours Truly, bringing developer skills, blog juice and media whoring par excellence
• David Crow, lending his expertise at rallying the local tech community, as well as his software development and interaction design skills
• Madhava Enros, who has forgotten more about the TTC than most people will ever learn; he’s also an interaction designer
• Mark Kuznicki, policy wonk extraordinaire
• Will Pate, social media maven and all-round networker
• Jay Goldman, organizer, coordinator, whip-cracker and owner of the meeting table
• Michael Glenn, provider of technology expertise and back-end know-how

Jay took my minutes of the meeting and from them, wrote an excellent article on his company’s blog in which he summarized our discussion. Here’s his description:

Figuring that we know a thing or two about building websites, we thought that we could offer some useful feedback to compliment the already excellent thoughts collecting in the comments on the original blog posts. In addition to our Solutions and Portfolio of experience, we know lots of really smart people who could bring a lot of value to the table. And so we did exactly that and gathered a crack team in Radiant Core’s boardroom to scratch our heads and stroke our chins and ruminate on how we could help to better the better way.

Jay then expanded on my notes and wrote an excellent write-up of every idea and point brought up at the meeting. It’s long, but it covers a lot of ground and I recommend that you read it.

He concludes the article with these points:

The TTC should re-open the RFP for the Website Redesign.

The original RFP closed on Thursday, November 23, 2006 and received responses from a number of traditional web shops (you can find the RFP info by browsing the somewhat confusing and highly frame-based TTC Materials & Procurements site, or by going straight to the otherwise-framed P01DR06363). The Planned Award date is February 1st, 2007 (which recently changed from January 29th), but we think a strong case can be made for the requirements having changed substantial as a result of the change in Commission Chair and the process kicked off by Robert’s post – strong enough that the original RFP should be replaced.

The TTC should completely embrace the community.

Soliciting feedback via blogs is a great start, but we’d like to see Adam Giambrone extend that initiative by keeping the rest of this process open and transparent (keep an eye on this space for a forthcoming announcement on this very topic). Collecting feedback in such a public fashion is an amazing step forward and we salute it wholeheartedly! Let’s keep moving in the same direction.

The TTC should set a goal of building the best Transit Authority website in the world.

Our former Mayor, Mel Lastman, was perhaps overly found of calling Toronto a world-class city, but he was often right. Even the best Transit websites out there don’t set the bar very high and we feel that this is an opportunity to demonstrate our technology and transit leadership by establishing a new watermark.

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There’ll be more happening soon — I’ll keep you folks posted. In the meantime, go read Jay’s article!