It does appear that Mr. Toliver was making progress on some fronts, but having said that, it is completely routine for a new mayor to want to choose his own department heads. Mayor Duggan will want to bring in someone who, in his estimation, will be able to rapidly attack the biggest problems DDOT faces. Given the amount of money available to DDOT, which admittedly isn't nearly enough, it could be doing much better than it is doing.

DDOT needs to accomplish several things. Roughly in order of importance:
1. Get as many of the broken-down buses repaired as possible, in order to have 227 available for service every single weekday without exception. As a practical matter this means you need to have 250-260 expected to be operational, so you have spares to put in mid-day when breakdowns happen.
2. Put in a system of preventive maintenance to get off of the roller coaster envisioned in problem 1.
3. Put together a contract with the employees so that it becomes actually somewhat predictable as to how many people will show up for work on any given day.
4. Rehire line supervisors. [[Bus systems do not run themselves.)
5. Get more reliable fareboxes so you can actually collect all the money the riders are supposed to be paying.
6. Restructure the routes completely, in coordination with SMART, M1 and the RTA, so the routes reflect the reality of the situation of 2014 [[where and when people work, live, go to school, go to the doctor, etc.) rather than keeping the route structure of 1927 and just cutting back a bit every year.

Of these, the first five could be accomplished very quickly; the sixth will take more time. It will be interesting, once we see who the mayor has hired, what that person's stated priorities are.