If you’ve ever fallen down a YouTube rabbit hole on the topic of public transportation, how it works, why it fails and where it somehow still manages to inspire awe, then there’s a good chance you’ve come across Reece Martin.
For the better part of five years, Reece built a reputation as one of the most clear eyed, curious, and prolific voices in the world of transit commentary through his channel, RMTransit. What began as a COVID-era diversion from a career in software engineering became, somewhat unintentionally, a full-time job and a global lens on how cities move … or in North America’s case, often don’t.
“I could be sitting on a bus and pop up my phone because I’m like, my God, I have an opinion,” he says. “And I’d just start writing a script.” That sense of urgency and compulsion to articulate what was broken, or brilliant or just baffling is what helped him rack up over a thousand videos across countries as varied as Japan, Brazil, the UK, Korea, Switzerland and Canada.
But earlier this year, he stepped back from the channel. Parenthood played a role, and a bit of burnout that while lots of people want better transit, the institutions aren’t really listening. There’s only so long you can document the dysfunction of North American transit systems without feeling like you’ve seen the same mistakes play out on a loop.
The Toronto (and North American) problem
Reece lives in Toronto. Which means he knows the difference between what people say they want and what actually gets built.
“There’s no shortage of people who care, but there’s a real shortage of people empowered to act on that. And worse, a culture of leadership that often seems to actively prevent those people from making things better.”
In other parts of the world, public transport is treated like core infrastructure. In North America, it’s often treated like a complicated hobby; something cities feel compelled to apologise for, outsource or bury under endless process.
That creates a dangerous mix of insularity and inertia. “The number of transit leaders here who’ve never worked anywhere else is wild,” Reece says. “There’s this attitude of, ‘Well, we’re better than Chicago,’ and that’s somehow the bar.”
Worse still, when people do propose improvements like better signage, better governance, better standards, they’re often sidelined. “I’ve seen it so many times. The smart person is stuck in the broom closet while senior leadership feels threatened. It’s not a system that rewards excellence … fives and sixes hire threes and fours. Nines and tens hire other nines and tens.”
In other words, insecure leaders rarely hire people smarter than themselves. And North American transit agencies, with their siloed departments, defensive politics and allergic reactions to outside expertise are full of limited leaders playing it safe to protect themselves, to the point that more driven, passionate and experienced talent gets sidelined from the industry altogether.
It’s not just a personnel, but a cultural issue. The inability to surround yourself with excellence leads to organisations that confuse safety with stagnation. So the cities they work for pay the price in the form of bloated budgets, bad interfaces, delayed timelines and a public that ends up lowering its expectations year after year.
What Good Looks Like
Reece is too well-travelled, physically and digitally, to fall into the trap of hero worship. He doesn’t pretend there’s a single city that’s cracked it all, but he has seen what functional ambition looks like.
He uses Singapore as a city state that took public transport seriously and built an excellent metro system, line by line, over a few decades. “Singapore showed you the Apple product. Like, a lot of places could afford that and just don’t buy it. It’s like, why is the whole world buying the Dell of public transport?”
Singapore might have spent a bit more, to not have the cheapest thing up front, but what they got was sleek reliable, efficient and replicable. It’s proof that a city can approach public transport as a high-quality product, not just a whittled down, minimally functioning utility. Meanwhile, too many other cities keep settling for something cheap, clunky and outdated, not because they have to, but because they can’t imagine asking for more.
Germany is another case study. Far from perfect given some serious generational underinvestment in infrastructure which impacts operations just now, but the experience has been designed to be ruthlessly rational to the passengers. “They figured out the process and applied it everywhere,” Reece explains. “You travel around the country and it all feels like one big, well-coordinated system. The signage is consistent. The infrastructure is recognisable. It’s just sensible.”
Even London, with all its quirks and historical baggage, gets points for turning its system into something people feel attached to. “There’s a charm to it,” he says. “The signs, the roundels … they’ve made it part of the city’s identity. It’s functional and beautiful. That matters.”
The Things We Refuse to Do
So what’s stopping Toronto, or any North American city, from doing the same?
Part of it, Reece argues, is a failure of imagination. “We keep thinking our problems are so unique. But they’re not. And the solutions already exist, we just refuse to adopt them.” He points to something as basic as signage and wayfinding. “We change our signs all the time. But we never make them better. Every agency has its own standard, and no one wants to give up control, even if it leads to chaos.”
But the bigger failure is speed. Toronto loves a pilot, after a slew of reporting or study phases where five year plans blur into twenty year ones. “Slow policy for things that can be done fast is useless,” Reece says. “Redesign the signs. Replace them all in six months. Show people you can actually do something.”
That obsession with process over progress shows up everywhere. Take the long discussed bridge to the Toronto Islands. Council recently approved a report to explore the possibility of studying the feasibility of potentially one day building it, instead of just … building it. It’s a common trait across Anglosphere cultures, of the time, effort and resources put into this part not providing the benefit of a better end product. In many cases, the outcomes end up being worse.
“We could do this, or with the money, we could probably just build a bridge. Like, we probably have enough money that if we just did it now, instead of this kind of endless report-making, we could actually deliver something.”
He imagines a different kind of transport authority for the region that has real integration, a bit like Transport for London, which runs everything from buses to subways across Greater London under a coordinated system. One where local knowledge is respected, but global practices are brought in unapologetically, so that decisions aren’t made by turf wars and logo placement.
If He Had a Magic Wand…
When asked what he’d do if given complete control, Reece doesn’t offer a utopia. He just wants Toronto, or Houston, or even Leeds as one of the biggest cities out there without light rail or a metro, or any city still studying light rail like it’s quantum physics to get on with it!
You want to build something that’s good,” Reece says. “There’s no reason why your bus shelter should be terrible. Just buy the product. Use it. It’s good. It’s proven.” He suggests starting in the suburbs or on the edges: “You could build something good in the suburbs and then over time expand inwards.”
Rather than complicating each transport project with things that feel increasingly more custom, the focus should be on what can be done off the shelf as Reece is eager to hammer home:“Why does every transit project have to be a new thing that takes forever to build and has all these hiccups?”
If Copenhagen can go from no metro to one of the cleanest, best-designed automated systems in the world in a couple decades, what’s stopping the rest of us?
“It’s not money because we’re already spending billions. We just don’t demand excellence with it.”
The Two Videos He Still Thinks About
After a thousand uploads, I ask Reece which videos he’s proudest of. He picks two.
The first is a simple, self-shot ride-along through Vancouver’s transit system. “I did the whole thing in a day,” he says. “Filmed it, edited it, uploaded it. It was just fun. It reminded me of why I started.”
The second is his video explaining how Tokyo’s dizzying train network actually works. “There’s no one place to get a clear overview of the whole system, so I tried to make that. Something people could actually use.”
It’s a perfect summary of his whole philosophy: start with curiosity, build something useful, make it easier for others to navigate complexity.
And if there’s one thing cities could learn from that, it’s to stop endlessly studying or consulting the problems, and just start building something better, even if it’s imperfect.
To being Challengers.
Share this post