Our focus has changed a bit. And it seems like you’ve noticed the new vision.

This Metrolinx blog was designed as a way to keep our customers, and the region Metrolinx serves, up on the latest announcements, projects and changes across GO Transit, UP Express and PRESTO.

But late last year, we began to use a new set of tools – or see things through clearer glasses.

We created a newsroom – dubbed MxNews – dedicated to not just delivering straight corporate messages, but rather, to telling our stories. And by ‘our’, we mean those who use our system to get to work or make it to the airport on time, people who are impacted when we hold up traffic or kick up dust while we work on major new transit options in communities, our many stakeholders who we work hand in work-glove with, those interested in how we daily move thousands upon thousands of customers around Canada’s most populated region as well as our employees who are users who daily work as improvers of those very important public transit services.

Click Here To See Top Stories Of January

So our developing mission, using editorial storytelling, is to capture more voices and more faces. Yours included.

The stories we are telling, as they vary from a single cool image to a breaking video message from our CEO Phil Verster to lengthy features taking you inside our operations and even our train cabs, now must answer one important first question – who would care about this? And then it becomes our job to show you why.

You seem to appreciate – or are at least increasingly interested in – what we’ve been trying to do in this space over the past few months. January saw a 127 per cent increase in views to The Link from December 2018 – which was previously our top month for audience. And December saw an almost 50 per cent rise from the previous top month.

So yes, thanks to you, the lines are moving and interest growing.

As encouraging as the analytical numbers are, we appreciate you are sharing our stories through social media in record numbers.

We’ll continue to chase and dwell on people and places in our transit world that we think you might like to hear about. And we’ll try new storytelling techniques – sometimes a quick alert and other times an engaging quiz – to make you understand our workings better.

Metrolinx extends wide, and even deep, across the Greater Golden Horsehoe and into Ottawa. It’s part of the daily lives of a great many Canadians.

We’re just pleased even a part of those days, for a growing number of you, is spent with us as we bring you these stories.