Canada’s beleaguered transportation giant Bombardier has once again run late on the delivery of streetcars to the Toronto Transit Commission, the city’s public transit authority.The TTC was expecting 40 streetcars by the end of 2017 — a number that was already far less than what Bombardier had initially promised — it will now only be getting 35 streetcars.In May, Bombardier promised the TTC that it would deliver 22 streetcars in the last three months of the year. So far, only three have arrived.TTC’s CEO Andy Byford called Bombardier latest flub “extremely disappointing and frustrating”.“There should be 146 new streetcars in service today; instead there are just 45. This is completely unacceptable,” Byford said in a statement.The tale of Bombardier’s inefficiency is not a new one. In August, the company was shut out of a $3.2 billion contract with the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority to build new subway cars because it was fed up with consistent delivery delays.Toronto’s streetcars are in a desperate need of an upgrade — the current fleet has been in operation since the late 1970s and the late 1980s, and they only really have a 30 year lifespan, according to the TTC.A whole bunch of old streetcars have been retired, and the TTC is using buses to fill that vacuum — a solution that is at best, a further contributor to the city’s traffic congestion.“This is not the result we worked towards and this is not the result we will accept for ourselves and for the people of Toronto,” Bombardier spokesperson Eric Prud’Homme told the Toronto star in an email.Bombardier does, however, claim that they will be able to deliver all 204 streetcars that the TTC has bought by the contract deadline of the end of 2019.That means, that in just two years, the company is going to have to build 156 streetcars, a manufacturing rate that the company has in fact, never successfully attained.Follow Vanmala on Twitter
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