David Cooper
Senior Transportation Planner
City Planning Division, City of Toronto
Since he was five years old, David Cooper has known he has wanted to be a transit planner. And, it runs in his family; his grandfather was a transit driver in Vancouver for 27 years and his dad worked in transit while getting through school.
Cooper joined the city of Toronto, City Planning Division, in 2013 to be the first member of the city’s new Transit Implementation Unit. He worked with senior staff to create a transit planning unit of eleven staff to plan and coordinate rapid transit expansion across the city of Toronto. He is the project liaison with the Transit Toronto Commission and Metrolinx on various significant transit environmental assessments and has also led planning work to improve streetcar operations on the King Street corridor, Toronto’s highest ridership surface transit corridor.
Prior to joining the city of Toronto, Cooper spent seven years at Calgary Transit in its strategic planning section. While working at Calgary Transit as a senior transit planner, he delivered many projects that transformed public transit in Calgary, including being a primary project team member for two LRT expansion projects, launched Calgary’s regional transit service, implementing two bus rapid transit services and he negotiated Calgary’s first developer-funded transit operating agreement in more than 20 years.
Since 2011, Cooper has taught 300 students as a sessional faculty member at both the University of Calgary and the University of Toronto, where he has taught courses on transit planning, transit-oriented development and transportation policy. He also recently created the Emerging Leaders in Transit Program, which runs at Ryerson University to facilitate knowledge sharing and inspire those who are curious about public transit.
Cooper has been extensively involved with both the Canadian Urban Transit Association (CUTA) and the American Public Transit Association (APTA) for the past 10 years. He firmly believes in the positive impact of public transit in community through his involvement in organizing four CUTA youth summits and two APTA youth summits since 2006. The youth summit program gathers youth from across Canada and the United States to learn the tools to become champions for walking, cycling and transit in their communities. He is presently a member of CUTA’s Youth Engagement Task Force and is leading the development of a five youth engagement strategy for the transit industry.
While in Calgary, Cooper also assisted in the founding and development of the Calgary Creative City Collaboration, a local non-profit organization that supports local emerging artists through the promotion and advocacy of public space and art. One initiative that was created through a partnership of the Calgary Creative City Collaboration (C4) and Calgary Transit was the transformation of a LRT station into a temporary art gallery.
Cooper was recognized as the recipient of the 2013 Canadian Institute of Planners President's Award for Young Planner of the Year and he is also a recipient of a 2013 Canadian Urban Transit Association Individual Leadership Award for his contributions to the Youth Summit on Sustainable Transportation program.
“You’re meeting people every day — residents, stakeholders, politicians, media — everyone has a pretty good idea of what they believe is the best solution to mobility and city building and infrastructure. There's lot of consensus building; it’s a lot of getting everyone to rally around a particular idea.
“About five years ago and I got to teach a class in transportation planning and development. It was a very enriching experience in terms of helping people light their fires and showing people what they can do to improve their community and not just sit there and do nothing, but to empower people to open up opportunities for themselves and others. I got such a kick out of that, I saw a lot of value in keeping in that line of work. It’s a lot of work, but it’s been pretty rewarding.”
“I’ve never had the same day twice. There’s always something that’s on the horizon, there’s always something changing, there’s always something moving, but there’s also something tangible. You can walk outside and you can see projects you’ve contributed to, you can see people have opportunity and access to mobility, for people to get to jobs and do things that make life worth living, like seeing family and friends, to going to school, and things like that. It’s a very meaningful thing to see; it’s not just sitting there and writing. Things actually get built and move along and places change. It’s a really cool thing to see that.”
"On a very sad note, this friend [Lawrence Hong] that I used to work with, he passed away ... he actually was stabbed to death; it was a pretty horrible. He was an advocate and volunteer. I got to teach him at UC and he worked with us on that particular Youth Summit and it was such a highlight for him personally and professionally, and then less than a year later he was gone. That changed my perspective. If you asked me five years ago … helping to extend the LRT and I think of it now secondary. It’s more what opportunities did we do together to grow together, what opportunities did I get to be a part of that I got to do great things for others personally or people in the community. I find that’s a lot more important now vs that hard infrastructure service delivery or the train lines or roadways. That’s great, but there’s more of an emotional attachment to other parts. It wasn’t what I expected in my career. It was a very eye-opening transformative thing."
“I think the most challenging thing is, change is hard. It pushes people's comfort levels; it’s unknown. Sometimes the unknown can be scary, sometimes the unknown can be nothing but beneficial. There’s lot of work that needs to be done in aligning people’s aspirations and focus into what they want to see in their communities and sometimes there’s a fight. Sometimes you go home and you’re like why does everything have to be so damn difficult? At the end of the day, you have to realize you’re in the business of changing and transforming communities and that’s a very difficult psychological thing that you’re doing. You need to make sure you’re doing the right thing, the process, ideas of the outcomes you’re going to get, it costs money, it changes how some people live day to day."
Fun Fact: He received the 2013 Canadian Institute of Planners President's Award for Young Planner of the Year and the 2013 Canadian Urban Transit Association Individual Leadership Award.
