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This week I decided to make a real commitment to reduce my personal carbon footprint and began to use the TTC as my primary means of transportation.

Part of the motivation came from my experience using public transportation in Japan last winter, which was a very positive experience.

Metropolitan Tokyo has a population of 35 million in an area the size of the GTA and 85 per cent use public transportation exclusively.

One of the highlights of my trip was being in Tokyo's Shinjuku station where 3.5 million people pass through it twice a day, making it the busiest in the world.

While the station was hectic, it was scaled for the number of people and you never felt crushed or overwhelmed.

I never once experienced the stereotype image of white-gloved station attendants packing people onto trains and was told that hasn't happened for years.

What a shock it was to discover how travelling on "the better way" has deteriorated for subway riders in Toronto.

For those heading downtown in the early morning, most trains are nearly packed by the time they arrive at Woodbine.

It only gets worse as you head west, where I saw people standing on the platform unable to get on the train by the time we reached Broadview.

A great deal of the problem lies in the poor use of floor space of the trains, which is taken up by badly designed seats.

In Japan the commuter trains and subway cars have a bench along both sides of the car and those are intended for children and the elderly.

It is expected that you will stand, and there are lots of hand-holds at a reasonable height to use.

As a result you can get a large number of people into each car and it is actually comfortable because it's designed to be used that way.

Another point that is really annoying on our subway, which I did not see in Japan, is people hogging the doorway.

You can see lots of empty space inside our subway cars, but you have this scrum of people standing in the doorway to get past.

That kind of selfishness would be unthinkable in Japan, where people realize that the only way the transportation system will work is if people co-operate.

Rather than waste millions of dollars in taxpayers' money on new equipment, the TTC should be looking at effectively using what we have. Rip out those space-wasting seats and redesign the doorways so that the door hogs won't crowd the space.

We have to stop running the TTC like it was 1968 when Metropolitan Toronto had a million and a half people, most of whom drove cars to work.

Future plans link new and existing TTC routes into the GTA, which is going to bring even more people into a system that is already overwhelmed.

The room is there if only the TTC opens it up through simple redesigns.