(Knight Ridder Newspapers circulated the following article by Ken Dilanian on May 24.)
LONDON — If American Tim O’Toole wasn’t sure quite what he was getting into when he was hired to manage London’s beleaguered subway system, he got a quick taste on the day his appointment was announced.
“American chosen to run the Tube was in charge of cattle trucks,” said the headline in the Evening Standard, alluding to O’Toole’s days as chief executive officer of Conrail, the now-defunct Philadelphia-based freight railroad.
The story noted dryly that he was late to his own news conference because of subway delays.
That was two years ago. These days, Londoners are still complaining about the subway they love to hate, which carries 3 million riders daily in often-crowded cars through narrow tunnels dug in the 19th century. But they also see reason for hope, thanks in part to O’Toole, 49.
The lawyer and longtime Conrail executive – who reports to another American, London transport chief Bob Kiley – has won good reviews for his initial efforts to shepherd one of the world’s largest subway systems through an ambitious modernization program.
He’s done it while grappling with what experts say is an ill-conceived scheme that put maintenance and improvements in the hands of private companies outside his control.
“O’Toole is certainly perceived by insiders as having done an excellent job,” said Christian Wolmar, a transportation expert who has written two books about the Underground, as the system is also known.
London Mayor Ken Livingstone, who, with Kiley, hired O’Toole after agreeing to take over management of the subway from the British government, said, “We still have a long way to go, but in less than two years under Tim’s stewardship, the Underground is safer, cleaner and more reliable than before.”
Born and raised in Pittsburgh, O’Toole attended La Salle University in Philadelphia, then spent 20 years with the Consolidated Rail Co. He was general counsel when the railroad was swallowed in a 1997 takeover and served as chief executive until 2001, as the merger was gradually implemented and Conrail ceased to exist.
“And then I went and played golf,” said O’Toole, looking very British as he toured the Underground with a reporter recently, his slim frame clothed in an elegant gray pinstripe suit, complete with pocket square.
Found by a headhunter for the London job, O’Toole relocated in 2003. His wife, Patricia, remains in Villanova, Pa., but plans to join him after their teenage daughter enters college. Their son is at the University of Virginia.
“London is where New York was in the early 1980s – it’s the city where the buzz is,” he said, citing a recent Newsweek story calling it “a model for making a 21st-century metropolis work.”
“Our job is to make the Tube live up to that story.”
He arrived on the scene at a seminal moment for the system, an iconic institution that shielded Londoners from bombs during World War II and now plays a crucial role in a city of 7.2 million where 80 percent of commuters use some form of mass transit.
“The Tube is absolutely fundamental to the way the city works,” said Stephen Glaister, a transportation professor at London’s Imperial College. “If the Tube stops, London stops.”
With 12 lines, 275 stations and 253 miles of track, it is viewed by most tourists as a pleasant, efficient way to get around central London. Indeed, compared to many big-city rail systems it seems top-notch. But after decades of underinvestment and neglect, the Tube inflicts a spirit-crushing ordeal on commuters, who endure cramped trains and suffer frequent service interruptions. The tunnels are so narrow that normal air conditioning can’t be installed – there is no place for the expelled hot air to go.
“For millions of working Londoners, the Tube is their only experience of Third World squalor,” Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins once wrote. “It is the nastiest thing they do.”
In the late 1990s, Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Labor government decided that the way to rebuild the Tube was to pay private companies fixed amounts to do maintenance and renovations and hold them to performance standards. In theory, that made sense, because the Tube was seen as a listless bureaucracy laden with featherbedding labor unions.
But, having paid consultants and lawyers almost a billion dollars to write minutely detailed 30-year contracts, the government ended up with a scheme so cumbersome that the potential benefits of privatization have been lost, experts say.
Last year, O’Toole reported that the two winning bidders were performing below the contract benchmarks, even though they are reaping tens of millions of dollars in annual profits. A month ago, an independent parliamentary committee concluded that the privatization scheme was more expensive than contracting out for specific tasks would have been.
Livingstone and Kiley were never in favor of privatization. They hired O’Toole for his railroad experience, but also because, as a lawyer, he knows a thing or two about enforcing contracts. His chief job, aside from dealing with day-to-day problems and managing a workforce, is prodding the private contractors to perform better.
Results have been less than stellar so far, he argues, because the companies are not spending enough. The companies dispute that, but the chief executive officer of one consortium, Metronet, was ousted by his board a few weeks ago. Terry Morgan, chief executive of Tube Lines, the other contractor, said he respects O’Toole and said his company was doing maintenance and improvements far more efficiently than government workers used to do them.
Squabbles over methods aside, the privatization brought with it a huge new commitment of public money – more than $2 billion per year – and things are getting better. Graffiti has been cleaned up, signals fixed, stations rebuilt.
O’Toole’s goal is to have a substantially improved Underground by the 2012 Olympics, for which London is a finalist. Two years before that, the Tube will get its first opportunity to renegotiate those maintenance and improvement contracts.
In the meantime, O’Toole has given up golf – he doesn’t have the time. And he rides the Tube everywhere he goes.
“It’s a religion with me,” he said. “You have to eat where you cook.”