At its November 22, 2023 Meeting, the TTC Board received a report and presentation from the Auditor General of the City of Toronto reviewing the Streetcar Overhead Maintenance department. This report was also considered a few days earlier at the TTC’s Audit and Risk Management Committee.

• Audit of the Toronto Transit Commission’s Streetcar Overhead Assets: Strengthening the Maintenance and Repair Program to Minimize Asset Failures and Service Delays
• Auditor General’s Presentation to the TTC Board
• Audit at a Glance
• Staff Presentation to the TTC Board
• Decisions of the Board

The audit was not complimentary. The Auditor General reviewed activities in 2022, and found that:

• There were major gaps in the tracking of overhead assets, inspections and repairs.
• Many processes were manual, paper-based or with limited use of technology such as an Excel spreadsheet to maintain a list of inspection cycles.
• Inspections that should have occurred on a regular basis (e.g. annually), took place at varying intervals if at all.
• Formal procedures to specify what constituted an inspection were missing, and the actual work done could vary from one inspection to another.
• A high proportion of identified defects had no matching completed work orders.
• The average time-to-repair for those that could be tracked was five weeks – two weeks to generate the corrective maintenance order and three to perform the work.
• The quality of maintenance varied with multiple corrective maintenance orders for the same asset.
• There was a lack of root cause analysis to identify and correct common failure types and locations.

Electric track switches repairs (for which the Streetcar Overhead section is responsible) were similarly not reliably tracked. The unreliability of streetcar track switches and resulting operational constraints (slow orders, stop-and-proceed rules) has been an issue for more than a decade. I will return to this later in the article.

The management response went into some detail about the work now in progress to improve the section’s procedures, record keeping and asset management. However, there is an inherent contradiction between the implication that this has been underway for some time, and the fact that the Auditor General’s review cites 2022 data, the most recent complete year, with poor results.

In a telling exchange between the Board and Management, Commissioner Diane Saxe asked if there were other groups within the TTC’s infrastructure maintenance suffering from similar problems. Fort Monaco, Chief of Operations & Infrastructure, replied there about 20 groups of which Streetcar Overhead would be the worst, but it is not the only one with problems. He said that these groups are better now, but there is still work to be done.

Arising from this exchange, Saxe moved that the Board:

Direct staff to report to the Audit & Risk Management Committee by the end of Q2 2024 on the state of preventative maintenance for the overhead system, and that the report include a remediation plan, if required.

Chair Jamaal Myers asked if there were similar issues on Line 3 SRT regarding preventative maintenance and work orders. Monaco replied that one would find a lot of the same thing, and the Subway Track team had just changed from an older Maintenance of Way Information System (MOWIS) to the Maximo system now used by TTC to track assets and maintenance work. Myers asked if staff are confident that SRT derailment was not caused by this, and Monaco replied that it was not caused by the changeover.

(The detailed report on the SRT derailment has still not been released.)

Vice-Chair Joanne De Laurentiis observed that maintenance tracking is a risk issue and would it be useful to have the TTC Audit group look at this in more detail, and then report back to Board. However, no motion to that effect was made and it is unclear what reviews will be conducted on the Board’s behalf.

Management has accepted all of the Auditor General’s findings. Their response can be found beginning on p. 89 of the report linked above (p. 72 within the Auditor General’s report proper).

An important note here is that this audit dealt with ongoing maintenance, not with capital projects. Followers of the streetcar system will know that the conversion from trolley pole to pantograph operation has taken much longer than originally forecast, and this has left the infrastructure in a mixed state for many years. Completion of this work appears to be decades in the future, a figure that is hard to believe unless the true aim is to limit the rate of spending within the overall budget.

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