Rage can’t cloud our transit thinking

If I could figure out how to spell it properly, this entire column might be filled with one long, anguished scream.

So many news items about Bombardier streetcars inspire that response.

It’s a combination of rage and frustration and regret and desperate helpless grief all at the same time. Like if the howling of a wounded wolf and the moaning of a whale and the screech of a horror-movie victim blended together. If I could spell it, it would express the emotional state many of us experienced again this week after the Star reported that 67 of the streetcars that Bombardier has so far delivered to Toronto will need to be taken out of service, shipped to Quebec and have a serious welding defect fixed. The good news is that they can be fixed one at a time to alleviate any disruption riders would notice. The bad news is that means we’ll be dealing with Bombardier on this streetcar order until at least 2022.

I worked with some colleagues on a long investigation into the parade of problems with this order last year, covering delays and delays and more delays in delivering the streetcars.

You may have heard of the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. These are also the five stages of reacting to Bombardier news in Toronto. We’re years past denial, though. We’re in an anger loop.

After all this, I wonder what it sounds like at TTC headquarters when the Bombardier plant’s Thunder Bay area code shows up on the call display?

In this case, apparently it sounded like someone saying, “Sure, let’s wait 10 months before we tell anyone, that’s reasonable.”

That is, the TTC and Bombardier reportedly became aware of the need to fix this welding problem in October 2017 (though they’d been aware of welding problems in 2015, the specifics of this one and how difficult it was were reported to the TTC last fall). Yet no one said anything about it until this week, when it appeared in an item on the CEO’s report going to the TTC board. Why? Is it because outgoing TTC CEO Andy Byford was preparing to open the Vaughan subway extension as his triumphant swan song on the way out the door to New York City and didn’t want to deal with the bad press?

Or is it because they wanted to wait until Bombardier had some good news to report, some sugar to try to make the medicine go down?

Last October, the Star was reporting that they would miss yet another revised production target.

Yet this week, on the same day my colleague Ben Spurr got the scoop on the recall, the headline in Thunder Bay’s TBNewswatch was that the company had met its ambitious, ramped-up production targets for streetcars two quarters in a row. Last year, the company was producing one car a month. This spring, they’ve been completing a car every three days. Even though they need to ramp up even further by the end of the year, a spokesperson said, they think they’re on target to finish delivering the order as promised by the end of 2019.

Except, of course, that now we know they’ll be fixing those cars for up to three years beyond that.

Anger. With long emphasis on the grrrrrrr.

Of course, the bargaining stage waits impatiently on the horizon: when the initial order for 204 streetcars is delivered, the TTC has to decide whether to exercise an option to place an order for 60 more streetcars with Bombardier. Many of us say: absolutely not. We cannot reward this company for this drawn-out torture by ordering up another dose.

Which is where the depression stage starts to rear its head. We need those streetcars, just to maintain current (sometimes insufficient) service levels. And there’s a strong fear that awarding the contract to another company would lead to more, longer delays. The decision is supposed to be before the TTC board next week, but it’s likely they may put it off until next year.

All of this has some councillors suggesting scrapping streetcars on some Toronto routes altogether, which would be a significant disaster for the city (leading to more costs and more congestion). That’s how big a fiasco this has been: one company’s handling of a new streetcar order could conceivably lead to the death of the streetcar in Toronto.

I don’t think we can get to the acceptance stage with that. It is an unacceptable result. As is Bombardier’s performance so far.

If we put off the decision until early next year, perhaps it will give us some time to think clearly. We can investigate the claims from competing companies of being able to meet the same delivery deadlines. We can examine, again, Bombardier’s claim that Baby-I-knowI-done-you-wrong-but-I’vechanged-I’ve-really-changed. Maybe then, we can think clearly on this, presumably with more streetcars in service and a sense of our options.

It doesn’t sound very satisfying when I say it like that. But maybe it sounds better than that now-familiar scream (however it is spelled).

We need those streetcars, just to maintain current service levels