On June 5, the TTC Board unanimously endorsed the recommendation of its selection committee to name Mandeep S. Lali as their new CEO. Mr. Lali comes to the TTC from New York’s MTA where he is currently Executive Vice-President & Chief Operating Officer, Subways. His transit career began at Transport for London in power management and signals (2002-2015), shifted to Otis Elevator (2015-2022), and then the MTA.

The committee included Mayor Olivia Chow, TTC Chair Jamaal Myers, former Vice-Chair Joanne De Laurentiis, Commissioner Paul Ainslie and City Manager, Paul Johnson.

Mayor Chow had very high hopes for a new CEO as set out in a letter to the TTC Board when the process began.

This process is more than just a search for new management. It’s an opportunity for renewal. It’s an opportunity to restore people’s faith in transit and to envision a bold future for transit in our city.

We must be a city where people choose transit first because it’s the fastest, safest and most convenient choice to get to work, school or run errands – everywhere.

The Mayor’s vision for what transit could be is much more ambitious than the TTC’s recent history and approach to transit improvement. Organizational issues including, critically, the need to rebuild employee confidence and morale, are substantially management’s responsibility. But there are limits imposed by political decisions on planning and funding at both the provincial and municipal levels. Toronto has bold hopes for transit’s future role in a greener city, but there is no sign of support for system expansion beyond routine year-over-year growth.

One significant gap in Lali’s experience is that he comes from a subway culture, and yet much of the vision for transit’s future requires substantial improvement and increase in the surface network service. That network has a very different operating environment, although basic skills such as building a trustworthy, competent management team do carry over. The challenge lies in knowing what questions to ask, and to know or at least sense if answers are boilerplate BS.

Mayor Chow wrote:

Imagine a system with far-reaching, frequent bus service. Where riders aren’t bundled up for 20-30 minutes outdoors, waiting for bunched buses to arrive. Where transfers are easy and reliable. Where there is always room to get on board. Where people can trust their bus to get them to work and home to their families on time.

[…]

People have to be able to count on their train, streetcar or bus to arrive on time, and to get them where they are going quickly – without surprise route changes, delays or bunching.

Riders might wonder just what the TTC, and by extension Council and the Mayor, has been doing in the past few years to address capacity and reliability.

TTC routinely touts a return to pre-covid service levels, but this is measured by vehicle hours, a metric that hides the slower operation of the system that delivers less actual service per hour than six years ago. Statistics on reliability and “on time performance” mask the actual experience of riders by averaging data across routes and weeks, where riders see service on their routes vehicle-by-vehicle and hour-by-hour. Problems with system maintenance came to light bit-by-bit thanks to major accidents and outages including the SRT derailment and the long-standing slow orders on the subway and streetcar networks.

A history of self-congratulatory announcements shows a culture that values “good news” over substantive information, and the need for management to report on that basis is an ingrained part of the TTC. An early test for the new CEO will be the transparency he brings to understanding what the transit system and our City must do to reconcile the TTC with the Mayor’s vision.

There are advantages to hiring an outsider who can bring a fresh outlook to Toronto, but there will also be a gap in institutional memory for both the TTC and the city it serves.

Back in 2018, after Andy Byford’s departure from the CEO’s office, I wrote:

What challenges does the new CEO face? Broadly, these fall into three categories:

• The political situation at Queen’s Park is in flux with a new Conservative administration headed by a Premier for whom subways answer every question, and who has talked of shifting responsibility for Toronto’s rapid transit network to Ontario from the City of Toronto.
• Toronto’s Council and Mayor send mixed signals on transit’s importance for the city’s economic prosperity and the good of its citizens, while keeping the TTC hostage to a tax-fighting dogma that demands ongoing restraint in budget and subsidy growth.
• The long-term effect of policies by all governments has been a wide gap between the funding needs – both capital and operating – and the money the TTC is actually allowed to spend. Many “big ticket” items are special projects like subway extensions, funded in part for their political benefit, but the hole left in day-to-day project funding continues to deepen.

Underlying all of these is a basic question: what is the TTC supposed to be?

[See Challenges For TTC’s New CEO]

Not much has changed on those fronts, although the budgetary situation has improved somewhat, but there is still a disproportionate focus on funding capital projects, not day-to-day operations. Going into an election year in 2026, the tug-of-war between demands for improved City services and holding the line on property taxes could leave the TTC little better off than in 2025.

The TTC’s Strategic Planning Committee, approved by the Board in January, has yet to even schedule a meeting. The Board is not exactly seized of the need for action, and yet a new CEO needs clear goals beyond just keeping the lights on and the trains rolling.

In December 2024, the search firm, Phelps, in preparing for the CEO’s recruiting, conducted interviews with many stakeholders to determine what characteristics were valued. [See Searching For a New TTC CEO]. Among many key attributes were:

• Demonstrated focus on rider experience, accessibility, and affordability.
• Passionate about improving transit systems as essential public services.

One major addition to the CEO’s mission is the repair of the years of a poisoned environment and a neglect of basics under former CEO Rick Leary. These problems stood out clearly in the Phelps report, and they will complicate setting a new direction for the TTC.

We can only hope that a focus on riders and on an improved TTC will bring a level of advocacy not seen for many years in the CEO’s office, and that Mandeep Lali will bring trust, integrity and inspiration back to that position.

See also:

• CP24: New York transit executive selected to be new head of TTC
• CityNews: TTC appoints former NYC transit executive as new CEO, replacing Rick Leary
• Toronto Star: TTC officially announces new CEO: ‘Why wouldn’t you want this job?’
• CBC: Former New York, London transit exec tapped to lead Toronto Transit Commission
• TTC: Statement by TTC Chair Jamaal Myers

Mandeep S. Lali’s job history from his LinkedIn profile: