In part two of our conversation with Barbara Gray, the General Manager of Transportation Services for the City of Toronto, we dive into the intricacies of living alongside the policies she shapes. Barbara offers a firsthand account of the thrill and challenge of seeing local change unfold, sharing moments like witnessing a bustling CaféTO patio, a tangible result of her team's hard work.
In this two-part episode of The Path of Public Service, we sit down with Barbara Gray, the General Manager of Transportation Services for the City of Toronto. Barbara shares insights into her career, from her early inspirations to her current role, where she navigates the complexities of Toronto's dynamic transportation landscape.
In the first part, Barbara discusses the evolution of her career, her passion for public service, and the significant projects she's spearheaded. She delves into her commitment to creating inclusive, sustainable urban spaces, highlighting her leadership in implementing innovative transportation policies that prioritize safety and accessibility.
The second part offers a closer look at the day-to-day realities of her role. Barbara reveals what it's like to live amidst the policies she helps create, balancing fast-paced decision-making with thoughtful community engagement. She talks about the challenges of leading a large team, the importance of work-life balance, and the gratification of seeing her work directly impact the lives of Toronto's residents. From managing the intricate relationships with city councillors to tackling the ever-evolving demands of urban transportation, Barbara's insights provide a compelling glimpse into the world of municipal governance and the relentless pursuit of a better city for all.
Listeners will be inspired by Barbara's dedication to public service and her vision for a more connected, equitable Toronto.
Timestamps:
(00:00:42) Work-life Balance
(00:11:20) Vision Zero in Toronto
(00:17:14) Accessibility for Aging and Disabled
(00:22:32) Building a Diverse Team
00:00:01 Katie Jensen (Host)
I'm Katie Jensen's and this is the path of public service from applaud celebrating people who have spent their lives working in Ontario's public sector. This is part two of our conversation with Barbara Gray, the general Manager of Transportation services for the City of Toronto. In this episode, Barbara shares what it's like to live alongside the policies that she gets to work on every day.
00:00:24 Barbara Gray
It's very heady stuff to see change happen at the local kevel. You know, I walked down the street, sort of doing a press event for Cafe TO, and see people sitting out on a patio enjoying an afternoon snack in a space that we worked hard to create. So that's pretty good feedback.
00:00:42 Katie Jensen (Host)
Her thoughts on work life balance.
00:00:44 Barbara Gray
It's not a badge of honor if you roll your vacation over every year and never take it. Because, you know, you may get to your retirement and you may never get to take it.
00:00:53 Katie Jensen (Host)
And what she's learned about leading a team.
00:00:55 Barbara Gray
It's really important to be a good, thoughtful, engaged leader, and that is a skill that you build over time. And by working with other great leaders and having great mentors to kind of model good behavior along the way, and also to model bad behavior, so you know what kind of leader you don't want to be, right.
00:01:14 Katie Jensen (Host)
We start by asking Barbara what an average day looks like when she's working at City Hall.
00:01:19 Barbara Gray
One of the things I love about my job is that every day is really quite different. But there is a bit of a cadence to my work at City Hall during the course of the month, because one of the main things that we have to do as public service staff is support the City Council. We have Council committee meetings that meet on various topics once a month.
00:01:40 Barbara Gray
We had one just this week. It was the infrastructure and Environment Committee. And at those committee meetings, there's a group of councillors that go. We bring reports, and the public gets to come and make deputations about the any of the reports that are on the agenda. And then one more week of the month City Council convenes, and that's two to three days.
00:02:04 Barbara Gray
We had that last week and we had a day on Thursday where we were there debating items until 11:00 at night. The Council covers a lot of content during those days, and staff needs to be there to provide feedback. And unlike other democratic organizations, like the province or the federal government, city staff speak directly to council, so we have to be on the floor of Council answering questions. And that is exciting and challenging and it's all televised so those are very, very busy, busy days.
00:02:37 Katie Jensen (Host)
How do you make sure that you have all the information that you need to respond to questions? Do someone in your ear fact checking and providing specific figures on the fly, or do you say that you'll follow up with them later?
00:02:47 Barbara Gray
They don't love when we don't have answers to questions. And I moved here from Seattle at the end of 2016. And I went into my first Council meeting and I was astounded at the questions that counselors would ask city staff on the floor of Council. Because you can prepare, certainly, I have an incredible team of staff who help me prepare for council every month. We use some tools to put key facts and information that we can share behind the scenes, and then we also communicate with answers to questions, so we can have our subject matter experts behind the scenes helping to support us as we're answering questions. But each councillor only gets 5 minutes to question staff, so you not only need to have a sense of the answer, you need to be able to deliver it quickly because they want to ask you a lot of questions.
00:03:37 Barbara Gray
It's very stressful, let's be honest.
00:03:39 Katie Jensen (Host)
How do you keep all the information about all the councillors in your head? Do you have a Rolodex, spreadsheets, some kind of cloud software?
00:03:46
Well, you know the Council are your people and they're kind of our work colleagues in an odd way. They're very connected to their communities and they're kind of part of our city family. We brief them in their offices. They call us up when they have questions. It's a pretty engaged relationship with the City Council. And you get to know their personalities and how they like to be briefed. I also have a group of six staff whose sole job it is to work directly with the councillors and the Council offices in each of the geographic areas of the city. And I understand, “Does this councillor like to be briefed once a month with a long list of things? Does this councillor prefer that we just swing by every now and again?” So you just have to get to know them and what they like.
00:04:30 Katie Jensen (Host)
You work in what could be perceived as a fast-acting role within the public service. Would you agree that you might see change come faster than others?
00:04:38 Barbara Gray
Yeah, I think that's absolutely accurate. It is fast-acting.
00:04:43 Katie Jensen (Host)
What is the double edged sword that comes with that?
00:04:46 Barbara Gray
The pace is quite significant. I know that people think that the bureaucratic process is long and it's convoluted. People love to say, oh, there's so much red tape and all these things. But I think if people really paid attention to what happens at City Council every month.
00:05:02 Barbara Gray
The City Council and the mayor manage enormous change agendas, everything from how to manage shelters and homelessness, to financial stability in a city that is as big and challenging and diverse as ours is, to various transportation files, to affordable housing, like, the range is remarkable. And they make big decisions and move forward huge bodies of work every month. So, while the pace is quite significant, and the amount of information that we have to kind of keep live and active in our brains is also quite significant, it's very heady stuff to see change happen at the local level.
00:05:46 Barbara Gray
And you know, I walked down the street after doing a press event for Cafe TO, and see people sitting out on a patio enjoying an afternoon snack in a space that we worked hard to create. So that's pretty good feedback.
00:06:00 Katie Jensen (Host)
Toronto's in a state of flux when it comes to transportation. Considering bike paths, TTC routes, construction, road work and also the highways that intersect through the city, I'm wondering about the kind of interactions that you have with the public with regards to complaints or frustrations when transportation improvement projects are delayed or disruptive in ways that are obviously not in your control are caused by you, but you're in a position nonetheless where you need to respond to dissatisfied feedback.
00:06:31 Barbara Gray
That’s just part of the role of being in a municipal transportation division. I always like to say that people in the city have an opportunity to interact with transportation four or five times a day. Every trip you make, your trip into work, your trip home, your trip to the coffee shop, going to get groceries.
00:06:47 Barbara Gray
And you really only remember the ones that were not great. So the ones that happened without incident are not the ones that stick in your mind. And we are in a really interesting time right now with regards to transportation in the city. We have very, very old, in need of repair and outdated infrastructure like watermains and sewers that are over 100 years old. We've got tons of development and investment in the city, which is a really great thing. But we have more cranes in the sky, building private development projects, than I think any other city in North America combined. We have over 180 cranes in the air right now.
00:07:26 Barbara Gray
We're building public transportation at a massive scale. We have the other challenge of doing some major renovation work on the Gardner Expressway. And all of those things, they combine to make people very frustrated. People also want a lot of choice in transportation. Maybe one day they want to ride their bike to work, and maybe another day they want to take transit, or another day they want to drive.
00:07:47 Barbara Gray
And they want us to be able to deliver that service equally across the board, and safely and directly. So we do engage with the public all the time. We try all different ways to get a pretty broad range of voices. And we focus pretty heavily on trying to engage with equity deserving communities in ways that are not just showing up to a public meeting, but really trying to have some meaningful conversations about what comes next for them and what their lived experience is. So it's complicated set of files.
00:08:19 Barbara Gray
The people who work for me are extremely talented and very committed, and they know that a lot of the changes that we make to the transportation network are going to be difficult for people in neighborhoods to live with, right? Because it's change, and change is hard. And so while sometimes it feels like the change takes a long time to deliver, we know that it is always better to engage with communities on this change, and try to understand what their concerns and frustrations are so that we can try to manage those before they become a problem.
00:08:53 Katie Jensen (Host)
How do you work with your team on changes to transportation that might prioritize certain constituents over others, while also balancing what's better for the city as a whole? For example, parking on major arteries, bike lanes, or projects that would benefit pedestrian use versus larger automotive traffic flow.
00:09:12 Barbara Gray
Those are the things that we deal with each and every day. Transportation is a network, right? It is a series of systems and some of them are interconnected. All pieces of those systems flow through people's individual neighborhoods, right down in front of their houses. And a lot of people have a lot of ownership over the street in their neighborhood, and honestly, we want them to because the things that you care about you look after and you take care of and you want to make look good and contribute to your community. So we want people to be invested in the streets and sidewalks and public spaces in their neighborhood. But that means they also have an opinion about how they function and what's most important. And we really do have to think about it from both perspectives. It's really hard to encourage people to meet our climate goals. And trying to get people to walk, cycle and take transit for most of their trips under 5 kilometers, that's kind of one of our climate goals in the City of Toronto, if you don't have a continuous network of bike lanes. Because then it doesn't feel comfortable or safe for people who are trying to cycle for their trip.
00:10:21 Barbara Gray
So, you have to think about it from the network perspective and recognize that it also has real impacts for people on the ground. Lucky for us, we have a lot of very talented designers and people with a lot of patience who are willing to go out and make changes to projects. So I always like to say that we stick around for a few years, usually after we put a controversial project in, because sometimes patterns change. You have a new grocery store that opens up two blocks away and all of a sudden the street that wasn't congested now is. Well, there are things that we can do to help to manage that.
00:10:53 Barbara Gray
So we have to be engaged, and use that enthusiasm and know that there are still going to be people who are very frustrated with our choices. Because if you are somebody who doesn't take transit, and we make a lot of decisions about how the road in your neighborhood is organized in order to support a streetcar or a bus, that might frustrate you because you might want parking in that space. And we just don't have space for everything, so we are forced to make choices.
00:11:20 Katie Jensen (Host)
Speaking of safety and cycling, can you describe what Vision Zero is, and how Toronto is implementing it now, and what the city is planning to do in the future?
00:11:30 Barbara Gray
The thinking around Vision Zero started in Scandinavia and Sweden in particular, I believe in the 1990s.
00:11:35 Barbara Gray
And Vision Zero as a safety program effectively says that all road collisions, injuries and fatalities are preventable. That implies that the way that we travel, the speeds at which we travel, the design of our roads, we are able to take action to make our roads safer for people traveling. Especially for our most vulnerable road users, and that would imply people who might have a disability, people who are walking, people who are cycling, people who are not driving in a car where you have that protection of all that steel around you. And so, a number of things that cities that have adopted Vision Zero policies have chosen to do is to prioritize vulnerable road users in areas of the city or in the whole city. And that might look like different things.
00:12:21 Barbara Gray
So we've done recently a big action to reduce speed limits in the city, because we know that if people get hit at higher speeds, they are much more likely to either be killed or suffer a serious injuries. So people traveling in their cars at slower speeds is more compatible with people walking and cycling, and therefore we see fewer injuries.
00:12:41 Barbara Gray
Many, many cities in North America and in Europe have adopted Vision Zero as policy, and so we all try to learn from each other about what works and what doesn't. And given population growth in Toronto, we have seen a relatively steady reduction over time in the number of fatalities and serious injuries that we're seeing, especially with our most vulnerable road users. And the goal is zero. That no loss of life is acceptable on our roads.
00:13:11 Katie Jensen (Host)
Who do you think is responsible for making transportation better?
00:13:15 Barbara Gray
I always like to say that people in Toronto are really engaged. And there's a lot of people who call in to the city to fix things in their neighborhood, they notice things, they notice graffiti, they notice the grass is too tall, t hey may have an opinion about how the traffic signals work. And I think that is the mark of a truly great city that people are engaged and they want to make things better. If there was not pressure from the community to continually improve our transportation network, I don't want to say we do things tremendously differently, but I certainly think that having that engagement from the community and the engagement from the media and the enthusiasm of the councillors to deliver for their community definitely puts the pressure on city staff to continue to innovate, to continue to roll out infrastructure more quickly, and try to make the heart of people's communities something they can be proud of.
00:14:14 Katie Jensen (Host)
Our city is so dynamic, with so many boroughs being further out from the downtown core. Sometimes it does necessitate having a car, if you live or work in Scarborough, Etobicoke North York, and you have to get around but maybe you're in a transit desert. Do you ever travel around the city using different forms of transportation just to get the perspective of somebody who has to navigate their particular neighborhoods’ infrastructure?
00:14:36 Barbara Gray
Yes, I try to get out all the time. And I think it's really important to know that everybody in the city is going to make choices about transportation that works for them and the people and their family for different trips all the time. And so people who live in Scarborough [and] work in Etobicoke. Driving might be your best option. Maybe you work a night shift and it's not really convenient for you to travel a different way. So having the ability to drive for some trips, to bike for some trips, to take transit for some trips, and to feel safe walking in the city when you're trying to get around in your local neighborhood, these all have to be possible for people.
00:15:14 Barbara Gray
A lot of people take the bus, and take streetcars, and take the subway. And so making sure that those networks are easy to access and that people can get there, that they're confident that, you know, most days that they're going to be able to be there on time. And that's a pretty tall order if you think about the city that it takes over an hour to get from one end to the other and certainly has 3 million people and growing quite rapidly with a lot of construction, it doesn't feel predictable. So I think the other thing that we have to do more of is give people the tools to make the best choices about what kind of trip they should make that day. If things are flowing on the Expressway and all of a sudden, there's a major crash, you wanna know, “Maybe now's not the moment for me to get in my car. Maybe there's a major subway outage. Maybe now is not the time for me to take transit.” And that can be inconvenient if that's how you travel every day.
00:16:09 Katie Jensen (Host)
I used to follow TTC alerts on Twitter when it was called Twitter not X, just to find out what was going on. And sometimes there would be nothing posted, and then I would switch to scrolling through police bulletins just to see was there a major accident? Was there a fire? It would be great if somebody could develop an app that combined transit information and road traffic information just for commuters to get a clearer picture of what route to take, because I think that's definitely a pain point for a lot of people who just want to get to work.
00:16:37 Barbara Gray
Google does a reasonable job of trying to, at least providing your travel time, options and things like that, but I think that there's more work that could be done there in those kinds of situations really our best partners are the private sector on that. Working with companies and people who are really smart about technology is a much better way than assuming that the city has the chops to do that kind of thin. So we work with external partners all the time. We have an agreement with Waze where we provide them with updated construction information, and we share information back and forth so that we can try to fine tune the travel information that people who use ways get and I think that's helpful for people.
00:17:14 Katie Jensen (Host)
I'm wondering about disability, and a rapidly aging population, and what provisions you're putting in place that are much needed but might not be able to be instantly implemented. For example, I know it takes years and years and years to make subway stations wheelchair and ability accessible. I'm wondering what other projects you're thinking about longer term that will help aging and disabled populations get around.
00:17:36 Barbara Gray
That is a great question. And I think everything that we do to make it easier for people to walk in the city ultimately helps an aging population. So, giving more crossing time, or what we call the pedestrian crossing signals, goes green before the traffic light goes green, so people have more time to cross at the intersection. Timing the lights in areas where we know there's a strong population or a big population of seniors so that they have more time to get across the street. Level sidewalks, good street lighting.
00:18:07 Barbara Gray
The most exciting thing that we've been doing in the last year around accessibility is we've been working with people with lived experience with disabilities to talk about ways to make our construction zones more friendly for people with disabilities and for pedestrians in general. So we have a new system where we are putting QR codes up on construction boarding so that people can see if they can use their screen reader to be able to understand the duration of construction impact, so maybe they would like to figure out a different route, how long they're going to be inconvenienced in that way, and a number of other things as well. So if you make the site better for people with accessibility needs beyond somebody walking with their two feet with full vision and full hearing and all of that, then you're going to make it better for everybody who's traveling.
00:19:01 Barbara Gray
We're just about to launch a team of people also with lived experience with disabilities, to help us prioritize and do a different job of prioritizing how we clear snow in the winter, because we do that as well, there's always room for improvement there. And I think that the work that we're doing now is going to get us a lot closer to a program that's going to work better for people who don't want to feel like they're shut in their homes, they want to feel like they can get out and get to the bus even when there's snow and ice.
00:19:30 Katie Jensen (Host)
With a metropolitan area as big as Toronto, how much of your time do you spend in systems thinking versus drilling down into specific neighborhoods?
00:19:39 Barbara Gray
I try to keep as much of my time in systems thinking as I can. And we have a lot of programs that are delivered in neighborhoods and some areas of the city unique to others. Like I'd mentioned the Cafe TO program that's largely in the downtown, and we have some neighborhoods outside of the downtown that also participate, but it's largely in the downtown.
00:20:01 Barbara Gray
And so, on the systems thinking side, I would argue that the benefits of some of the programs that we deliver in neighborhoods, you kind of have to think about, "Well, what could those benefits look like even if you didn't deliver them in exactly the same way?” “So how do you help to support small ownership restaurant businesses in areas that are in strip malls and not downtown? Is there different types of programs that we can look to to help support those businesses in the same way that we can support the smaller restaurants that are in the downtown?” So I think the systems thinking part is really important.
00:20:33 Barbara Gray
When we deliver our programs in neighborhoods, we learn a lot about what works and what doesn't work. And that's the kind of thinking that, if you can bring that neighborhood base thinking back up to the systems level, it can really help with the next time you deliver a project in a different neighborhood. So I try to keep as much of my thinking at the systems level, but I think there's real value in understanding how our systems play out on the street in our various neighborhoods.
00:21:00 Katie Jensen (Host)
What would you tell a younger person who's interested in transportation and pursuing a role like yours? What advice would be helpful to someone who hopes to have your job many, many years down the line when you’re retired?
00:21:12 Barbara Gray
I would characterize myself as a pretty good generalist, and I have not taken a straight path to get to my current position. I started my career doing direct customer service, waiting tables and working in restaurants, and things like that. I worked in the theater for a little while. And then when I went to Graduate School for urban design and planning, I was really focused on neighborhood history. I worked in the private sector. I owned my own business for a little while. Worked in an architecture firm. I did a lot of different things. I didn't sort of just go on a straight path. And then when I went to work for the City of Seattle, where I worked for almost just under 20 years, I had a lot of different jobs. I had planning jobs. I worked in all aspects of the organization – in the permitting side, on the enforcement side, we had an urban forestry group, I worked in that group for a little bit. So I did a lot of different things, which gave me a really broad perspective. And I ended up starting to be interested in managing people at some point along the way there, and I started with a very small team.
00:22:12 Barbara Gray
And it's really important to be a good, thoughtful, engaged leader, and that is a skill that you build over time and by working with other great leaders and having great mentors to kind of model good behavior along the way. And also to model bad behavior so you know what kind of leader you don't want to be, right?
00:22:32 Katie Jensen (Host)
When you're looking to add someone to your team or build a group for special projects, would you say that you're looking to reflect the skills you already have that you know work well for the job? Or do you look for skills that you might not have in your toolbox that you'd want to bring to your team?
00:22:45 Barbara Gray
I would say first I look for people to supplement my own skills, because I think it's really important in a job like mine, with as many subject matter areas that we cover, is you have to have people who complement your skills. And that only works if the team is strong. Because if you have people who work in your team who have complementary skills but they don't actually collaborate, then I think you don't get the same kind of benefit.
00:23:16 Barbara Gray
But I have a fantastic directors team and we do not all have the same skill set at all. We don't have the same work style. But we spend a lot of time working together, and we collaborate, so that we can benefit from all those distinct skill sets and help to inform the problem that we're trying to solve.
00:23:33 Barbara Gray
And then when you're like me and you're kind of a good generalist, you end up having people in your team also who do have very similar skill sets as well, so I think it's a bit of a mix.
00:23:44 Katie Jensen (Host)
We have Gen Z fresh in the workplace and I'm pretty sure Gen Alpha is going to be applying for internships soon, and that's creating a really cross-generational workplace. What are you seeing from younger generations that are bringing a renewed perspective to the department, the city, and urban planning in general?
00:24:01 Barbara Gray
I would say one of the most beneficial changes that we've seen, from certainly the younger generation coming in, is just a really strong focus on equity and inclusion across the board – like, deep thinking, how we make decisions, who we engage with and how do we engage, how do we support people at the office.
00:24:24 Barbara Gray
A second piece of it is also how we work, how we show up for work. And we start to see Gen Alpha coming into the workplace - they've had a really challenging last five years. And we have a social committee at the office now at Transportation. And there has been just a resurgence of enthusiasm for people being social and being together. And what we used to call like “hanging out the water cooler” kind of thing, or going for a beer after work. And now people are really enthusiastic about getting involved in soccer tournaments, going out and doing sports and going for hikes, and a much broader cross-section, which I think is fantastic. Because a few years ago, in the division, we didn't have as much enthusiasm for that.
00:25:07 Barbara Gray
And then on the other side of the equation, I have a number of people in the organization who are 65 and older. And do not count those folks out. I'll tell you, we have some really incredibly thoughtful, fresh thinkers who have tons of great experience and are not set in their ways, eager to look at things from a fresh perspective. And that's just a person-to-person thing, but I really feel like we have to be very mindful about having that cross section of thought in our workplaces, to really benefit from both people with a really fresh, young, new exciting perspective on things as well as people who have been around for a while, who still can bring that same enthusiasm.
00:25:49 Katie Jensen (Host)
Is there anything we didn't cover that you're hoping to share?
00:25:51 Barbara Gray
The only thing that I would say, and I think it's really really important, is that you have to take care of yourself in whatever way that matters to you or make sense in your life. You have to have balance. And I don't think that people can be as effective as leaders if they forget to take some time for themselves. So I really strongly encourage everybody on my team to take your vacation, to not answer your emails at 9, 10, 11:00 at night, and sometimes people still do.
00:26:25 Barbara Gray
But I think leaders have a really outsized role in setting the tone and the culture of an organization, and that's something we have to take very seriously. People who have a life outside of work that they feel engaged in and they can take some time for themselves and have a breath, I believe are much more engaged and productive at work. And so that's kind of the environment that I try to set. That's the kind of culture that I try to set and my folks work hard. We were at Council till 11:00 on Thursday night last week. People are out at doing community meetings all the time. But I think we have to try to strive to find that balance and take vacation. It's not a badge of honor if you roll your vacation over every year and never take it.
00:27:07 Barbara Gray
Because, you know, you may get to your retirement, you may never get to take it so, for people who might be listening who are leaders themselves, you set that culture for your organization. You're the one who does it.
00:27:22 Katie Jensen (Host)
Thanks for listening. Applaud is proud to showcase the dedication of those who make decisions for the greater good, and strive to leave the world a better place for all Canadians. All personal views expressed by guests and our host are their own. Applaud will continue to recognize those in public service, offer a kaleidoscope of perspectives and operate in good faith to build trust with Applaud members and all public citizens. You can share feedback on this episode by visiting applaudpublicservice.ca