Josh Colle has a test for whether the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) is keeping up with the people it serves. It involves his teenage son.
“He would be mortified if there’s any service that he would have to interact with that he could not procure from lying in his bed on his phone,” Colle, chief strategy and customer experience officer of the TTC, told a Toronto Tech Week panel last month. “That’s the new user we’re dealing with.”
For most of transit history, Colle explained, the experience ran the other way. You left home with almost no information, waited at a stop hoping something would come, and got few cues along the way. The agency measured itself by buses moved and parts fixed.
“[It’s] not very user or customer or people centred,” he said.
A 106-year-old institution with almost 18,000 employees, more than 34 billion customer trips, and legacy infrastructure isn’t always able to modernize entirely on its own.
I mean, they still have an in-house blacksmith to forge and repair no-longer-manufactured custom parts for older vehicles. Legacy systems, indeed.
Transit needs to be future-ready and innovative, as cities grow, traffic snarls, and people expect to get from point a to point b faster and cheaper.
Let’s not forget that climate concerns are also causing a push for more investment into better public transportation. Toronto is often called a world-class city, and needs a reliable system that matches.
So when that network of subways, streetcars, buses, and light rail happens to be in a major innovation ecosystem, you’re going to look in your own backyard for solutions.
The panel “Tested in Toronto: TTC Partnerships Driving Transit Innovation” highlighted the TTC’s approach to innovation, bringing startups, academic institutions, and industry partners directly into the agency’s work. The discussion was moderated by TTC’s manager of new technology and innovation Naina Dewan.
The TTC gets access to cutting-edge ideas and outside expertise, and partners get access to a real transit system to test them in, helping strengthen their own innovation work.
With Toronto’s first FIFA World Cup 2026 match kicking off today, the world is at the city’s doorstep for the biggest sporting event on the planet. At the same time, AI and other emerging technologies are changing how key jobs such as predictive maintenance are done, while frontline operators want (and should have) a seat at the design table, especially when it comes to safety.
Here’s how the TTC is teaming up to get it done.
Turning legacy infrastructure into a sandbox
Anyone who has stood around waiting for a subway or streetcar, watching a tracking app or updates screen, has an opinion of what their transit system needs.
And as much as a major public transit agency would want to throw open its doors to everyone, saying “alright, folks, let’s see what sticks,” there needs to be some degree of organization.
Wenzi Ckurshumova, PhD, is the associate director of sustainable transportation and transit research at Centennial College. She is part of the Bus Design Innovation Program, an applied research program founded by the college, the TTC, the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) International, and ATU Local 113, created in 2023. Their goal is bus-of-the-future design concepts that prioritize health and safety for operators.
One of the initial designs was a complete barrier that shields the bus operator from the rest of the bus, which helps reduce assault risk while keeping an unobstructed view of the front mirrors.
She described the program as an open ecosystem where companies use the TTC’s infrastructure and expertise in a sandbox environment, safely testing their technologies before they’re ready for the real world.
What makes it valuable is access most startups can’t get anywhere else.
“Not only do we provide infrastructure and expertise, but we also allow companies to get access to 100 years of operational experience,” Ckurshumova said. “What this really allows us to do is it allows companies to iterate faster…to bridge the gap between innovation and commercialization.”
The TTC has taken the same collaboration approach with Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) and tech incubator DMZ.
In March, the three organizations launched a new phase of the Transit Innovation Yard, a joint initiative proposed in 2025 funding selected startups and academics that trial new ideas inside the TTC’s system. The new phase features five research projects that look at operations, infrastructure, and customer experience. They include:
The projects are expected to run over the next nine to 15 months, at no cost to the agency, and will end with recommendations and next steps.
Partnerships like the Transit Innovation Yard create “an extension of the organization that allows us to think differently,” said Hayley Waldman, acting head of communications and marketing for the TTC.
“We can tap into the best and brightest, we can tap into student minds, we can chat with innovators, we can chat with people who are building startups, and get a sense of what people want, what the industry wants, what we need to do better, and kind of work with them on the solutions that we also know that we need.”
Using technologies like AI, drones, and digital twins for issues like bus maintenance or track defects is very new for a legacy organization like the TTC, she explained, but such a partnership makes these opportunities tangible.
“Employees can say, you know, I need help with this, and we can actually get them the help that they need in a safe environment and pilot opportunities to influence long-term change at the TTC.”
Bridging the commercialization gap
If Centennial supplies a sandbox, the Ontario Vehicle Innovation Network (OVIN), the Government of Ontario’s initiative on automotive and mobility transformation, supplies a runway.
Mona Eghanian, assistant vice-president and deputy head at the OVIN, stressed the importance of mobilizing (pun intended) the commercialization of transit innovation.
“We can develop technologies, we’re very good at doing that here in Ontario, here in Canada, but the challenge is, how do we actually start to deploy those technologies in a real-world environment,” she said.
A lab can’t necessarily replicate the way mobility technology has to interact with infrastructure, systems, and users all at once in the real world.
Enter a recent partnership between the TTC and OVIN.
Part of the OVIN’s Technology Pilot Zones, launched in 2024, Ontario companies will be able to receive up to $100,000 to pilot their tech inside the TTC network.
Eghanian sees these zones as first customers, and to date, they have piloted and commercialized over 40 new technologies, largely focused in zero-emission vehicles, connected and automated vehicles, and intelligent transportation systems. Current partners include the City of Toronto and the Federal Bridge Corporation’s Blue Water Bridge.
Eghanian sees the program as reducing barriers for smaller companies to work with large partners like municipalities or transit networks.
“It’s still very competitive at the end of the day,” she added, “and there’s obviously challenges with capacity because we can only take on so many innovations in our environment, but it’s really opening the door to what the possibilities are.”
The ecosystem under World Cup pressure
Here’s where it gets interesting.
With the FIFA World Cup starting, and Toronto as one of 16 host cities, the TTC is facing what Waldman called a “pressure cooker” for the digital customer experience.
It’s a “once-in-a-generation opportunity,” she said.
“Anything that was already being worked on is perhaps being accelerated, so that it’s ready in time for the World Cup.”
As a result, the agency is taking a different view of their customers, considering that many soccer fans may have never been to Toronto, may not speak English, and may never have connected a subway to a streetcar to a bus.
“It’s created this vacuum, in the best way possible, where we’ve all kind of gone together,” she said. “To think about how we can use this experience to ensure that our customers are seeing the best of what we have to offer.”
They want to make the experience either “unremarkable, in the best way” she added, or a really great experience that can be taken back as a suggestion for their transit system at home.
Waldman shared an anecdote of how the TTC is accelerating customer experience changes to welcome both thousands of soccer fans and the typical summer tourists.
She described a high school student, working through a TMU/TTC innovation challenge, who suggested that riders at a bus stop should be able to know, in real time, whether their bus was coming and when. She got to tell him in the room that the idea was already moving.
“Although he just suggested this three days ago, we were installing the first e-paper device kind of as we spoke,” she said.
A staff report from the TTC assumed that 70% of people will travel to the stadium or fan zones by transit. As a result, “the customer experience is going to be much more digital,” Colle said.
He’s clear that the digital upgrades going in across the system are meant to outlast the World Cup tournament, and that they’re prepared for the influx.
While Toronto is just one of 16 cities hosting games, they’re acting as if the entire series of games will be in the city.
“I think some people might think that’s a bit of overkill,” Colle explained. “What this really is, is there’s an opportunity for us to show the city, the world, what good transit looks like. Let’s show ourselves, right?”
Just because the TTC wants to be prepared for a major event, doesn’t mean Torontonians can’t demand the same reliable, easy transit experience.
“We want people who are just going to school and to work and using our system every day to see that, and to kind of hold our feet to the fire and say, you did it for World Cup,” said Colle. “Why should that not be our standard?”
How the ecosystem is building AI and a digital twin
Prior to the panel discussion, the audience saw a live digital twin prototype of the TTC’s subway network, built with the firm Disruptive Edge.
The AI-native strategy and innovation firm has an ongoing partnership for innovation-based projects. The digital twin is a foundational tool that shows current data (although based on mock data, since it’s a prototype), and can be spun out into a variety of use cases.
This is a separate project from the above-mentioned drone-based tunnel twin funded through the Transit Innovation Yard. This model renders each station in 3D, pulls in historical and real-time sensor data, and uses that to feed an AI predictive maintenance model.
The AI flags maintenance problems three to six months before they surface and recommends what to fix and when. The agency could pivot from reacting to breakdowns to heading them off.
A prototype predicting track failures in a controlled demo is one thing, specifically a more traditional use of AI. Generative AI, and how it’s implemented across a transit agency of 18,000 people, with all the cultural resistance, misunderstanding, and risk that comes with it, is something completely different.
Andrea Kerswill, an expert-in-residence at DMZ, Toronto Metropolitan University’s startup incubator, drew a useful line through the AI conversation.
The challenge now, she said, isn’t whether AI can make individuals more productive. It’s whether organizations can turn AI-driven productivity into a “multiplier effect” across teams. And that runs through culture.
She used a failure of her own to demonstrate. Feeding meeting notes into a model to build a report, she got back something invented.
“It came back and completely gave me something different, and pretended like somebody that was in the meeting that I was trying to grab notes from was not there,” she said.
Generative AI doesn’t know how to say it doesn’t know, she explained. Teaching staff why hallucinations happen is now part of the job, a lesson that can be applied across almost any sector using LLMs.
In a post-panel Q&A, a representative from ATU Local 113 asked whether AI was there to take transit workers’ jobs.
“Bringing the operators to the design table when those solutions are being designed is extremely critical,” Dewan answered. “We don’t want bus operators, and you know, other operators as well, to just be at the reactive end of any solutions that we’re rolling out, and that’s why it’s critical to build tables like we’ve done with OVIN and Centennial.”
Colle didn’t hedge.
“Any of our exploration in innovation, particularly AI, in no shape or form has ever been discussed or thought of as a way to replace jobs,” he said. “Our business, the transit mobility business, will always be people driven, quite literally and figuratively.”
The goal, he said, is to take the hardest parts of a long shift off an operator’s plate, not to remove the person working it.
When you think about it, that’s exactly what the partnership model is doing for the agency itself.
Final shots
- The TTC still has a blacksmith, but it’s also working on a digital twin prototype with an AI-native firm that sees subway failures coming three to six months out. Their partnership model connects those two realities.
- The World Cup is a deadline, but it’s a chance to show Toronto, and the world, what good transit innovation looks like. The question is whether that standard outlasts the tournament.
- Any organization deploying AI into a frontline workforce needs people at the table before the tool is built, not after.