‘Rock star’ leaves TTC proud
Brad Ross, the face, voice and online personality of the transit system for the past decade, is moving to city hall
It was a blackout a decade ago that Brad Ross says inadvertently led him to invite the potential wrath of 1.7 million transit users down on him every day.
Ross was less than a year into his job as director of corporate communications at the TTC, when on the evening of Jan. 15, 2009, a malfunctioning sprinkler flooded a city transformer and knocked out power to 250,000 residents and much of the west end.
Subway service was suspended on a portion of the Bloor-Danforth line, and Ross dutifully did interviews with local media to alert riders of the disruption.
Then he logged onto Twitter, which until then he’d mostly used to post about the Toronto Maple Leafs, to spread the news. And something happened:
“I started to get questions, and it started to get retweets, and it started to really pick up. That’s when the light kind of went on for me,” he said.
That real-time engagement with customers that social media offers soon came to seem imperative for Ross, 55, who for the past 10 years has been the face, voice and online personality of the transit system many Torontonians love to hate.
He’ll end his time at the TTC on Friday, and next month start a job as the City of Toronto’s chief communications officer.
In his time at the agency, he’s had to defend unpopular policies, talk customers through a transit strike, and even faced serious harassment, but has also earned praise for what many see as his direct, transparent and personable approach.
“I think he’s a rock star,” said Amanda Galbraith, a principal at Navigator communications firm and a former director of communications for Mayor John Tory, who described Ross as straightforward and knowledgeable, but said his greatest talent could be his ability to relate to customers. “You want to like the people you’re hearing from, even if you’re hearing bad news (about) TTC closures or shutdowns.” As a member of the TTC executive, Ross oversees about 50 staff members. Still, nearly every day he takes time to answer questions posed to him online by members of the public.
He said while “people are not shy about letting us know how we’re doing,” the vast majority are polite — if a little fed up.
“When people yell, or virtually yell anyway, they’re frustrated, right? I get it,” he said. “I’ve ridden the system all my life. So I know how frustrating it can be waiting for a vehicle.”
Ross grew up in North York and Scarborough and initially wanted to be a radio DJ before he got into communications. His Indochino suits conceal about 15 tattoos, the first of which he got in his late 40s.
On one wall of his office at the TTC’s Yonge St. headquarters hangs a black leather jacket; on another a bus station map the transit agency removed after customers complained it looked too phallic. Ross says he kept it as a conversation piece.
What’s as notable as his sense of humour is how often he admits the TTC got something wrong, be it inadequate service or his recent admission the agency should be paying artists whose work is posted in trains.
“Brad’s abiding achievement at the TTC was to encourage us to own bad news,” said former CEO Andy Byford, who was Ross’s boss from 2012 to 2017 and considers him a friend.
“So many big corporations try to ride out a controversial issue by pulling up the drawbridge and hoping it goes away, but Brad insisted that such a strategy was flawed and that it was far better to get out and tackle it.”
From the start, Ross had no shortage of bad news to talk about. Three weeks after he joined the TTC, transit workers went on an unexpected strike. Employees took vehicles out of service at midnight on Saturday, April 26, 2008, hours after union members voted down a contract settlement their leadership had reached with TTC management. Torontonians woke up the next day without a working transit system.
“I believe that strike, because we inconvenienced so many people, it turned people against the TTC,” Ross said.
Ross said the biggest regret of his TTC career came in January 2010. On Jan. 9, a passenger snapped a photo of a subway collector asleep inside a station booth and posted it to on social media. The image of the “TTC sleeper” garnered widespread media attention.
The employee, a 29-year TTC veteran named George Robitaille who had once saved a disabled customer’s life, later said he had a health issue. He died of a stroke 10 months later.
Ross said management was initially unaware Robitaille was sick, but he regrets not doing more to publicly stand up for him. “I wish I could have it back,” he said. “Did we ask the right questions? Did we push back enough?”
Ross says his very public role has recently exacted a toll on him and his family. Since the summer of 2016, he has been the target of what appears to be an online harassment cam- paign that became so serious he contacted the TTC’s special constables and Toronto police.
He also began receiving late night calls to his cellphone (he gives his number out on TTC press releases).
He now takes precautions that include leaving his office by a different route each day, and removing his agency name tag when in public. He’s installed a security system at his home.
Among Ross’s few detractors are the leaders of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 113, which represents the majority of TTC workers. Secretary-Treasurer Kevin Morton said that during Ross’s tenure the TTC has misled the public about the depth of the problems on issues such as Presto fare card system and the delayed streetcar order.
“He is a product of his environment, and his environment right now is to mislead and not tell the public the truth about Presto and the new streetcars,” Morton said.
Ross rejects the assertion. “There isn’t a public agency that I can think of that is as open and transparent and under as much public scrutiny as the TTC,” he said.
Ross said the initiative he’s most proud of is changing the way the TTC talks about suicides on the subway system.
He believes speaking honestly about suicide humanizes the deceased and raises awareness about mental health issues.
Ross said there was no one reason he decided to leave the TTC now, but admitted he won’t miss the 5 a.m. calls from transit staff alerting him that subway service is down and he has to tell the public.
When the job at city hall opened up, he said, he saw an opportunity to take “what I’ve been doing here and see what I can apply down there to make the city more accessible to people.”