Late transit-vehicle delivery is urban issue
Toronto in the same boat as New York and Cincinnati in waiting for new streetcars
Commuters sweltering on old TTC streetcars this week can take some comfort in knowing that Toronto isn’t the only city seething over the late delivery of new transit vehicles.
While Torontonians curse Bombardier’s glacial delivery of the new air-conditioned fleet, New York, Kansas City and Cincinnati are also facing delays on transit deliveries.
The Montreal-based Bombardier’s delivery of more than 200 Red Rocket streetcars, being assembled in Thunder Bay, Ont., is already a year behind schedule. Currently, only eight are running on Toronto’s streets, when 60 were supposed to have been here by now.
Meanwhile, New Yorkers expecting new Bombardier subway cars in 2017 are now facing a delay until 2022, according to a report by DNAinfo, which bills itself as a neighbourhood news website.
It will cost the Metropolitan Trans- portation Authority $50 million to keep the old subway trains running while it waits for the 2012 order of 300 new subway cars contracted for $599 million.
Whereas poorly fitted parts from Mexico and peeling laminate are among the delay factors in Toronto’s $1.2-billion, years-late streetcars, Bombardier is citing bad welds and cracked car shells with the New York order.
Bombardier spokesman Marc-Andre Lefebvre said “there’s absolutely no correlation” between the Thunder Bay plant producing Toronto’s streetcars and the Plattsburgh, N.Y., plant building the R179 subway sets for New York. “There hasn’t been any work done in Mexico on these (subway) cars,” he said.
As with Toronto, however, the issue of who pays for delay-related costs remains unresolved.
“Any commercial issues are set forth in the contract in terms of any penalties or damages that may be incurred, so that is an ongoing process,” said Lefebvre. When mega-orders from New York and Toronto aren’t enough to guarantee prompt service, consider the challenge of smaller markets.
Kansas City, Mo., is having “strong conversations” with the Spanishbased supplier building four streetcars for the city’s new 3.2-kilometre, 16-stop downtown line.
The $18-million order from CAF USA was supposed to arrive in June in time for testing on the tracks that are now fully laid, according to city spokesman Chris Hernandez.
Then the schedule slid to September, and the contract penalty of $1,000 a day for late delivery kicked in. CAF is now paying a late penalty of $3,300 a day, with a $1.2-million cap. It has, nevertheless, suggested the end of the year as a revised delivery deadline.
“We have not yet accepted that proposal. We are still negotiating,” said Hernandez, who says he’s heard several reasons for the stalled delivery.
The one that stands out is that a ship delivering parts to CAF’s Elmira, N.Y., assembly plant left with the freight still sitting on the dock.
A Cincinnati, Ohio, spokeswoman said she can’t comment on reported similar delays for that city’s $25.5million order for five streetcars from CAF. But a progress report online shows that the first car delivery is eight to 12 weeks behind schedule.