Vehicles

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A Surfeit of Streetcars

The last of the TTC’s 60-car add-on streetcar order arrived in Toronto recently, and entered service on December 16, 2025. This brings the streetcar fleet to 264 vehicles.

4663 at St. Clair Station Loop, December 16, 2025. Photo by Jeffrey Kay.

With so many streetcars, the real shame is that the service is so poor on many routes through a combination of 10-minute headways and erratic operation, not to mention the effect of never-ending diversions, construction projects and bus replacements.

The TTC began a shift to a 6-minute headway standard with 512 St. Clair earlier in 2025, and this was followed by 505 Dundas and 511 Bathurst in mid-November.

Due to construction at Queen & Broadview, the 503 Kingston Road car is operating with buses, and will continue to do so at least until April 2026. There are moves afoot within the TTC to kill off the all-day operation of the 503 downtown, but one of its biggest challenges comes from irregular service on the 503 itself, and the total absence of headway blending where the 503 joins the 501 Queen car westbound at Kingston Road and Queen. Pairs of 503 buses are a common sight today, and 503/501 pairs were common when streetcars plied both routes.

The TTC simply does not take seriously the effect of unreliable service on ridership.

As we see a move to a new 6-minute standard, the question is just how far the 264-car fleet will stretch. The table below shows all of the streetcar routes with headways and PM peak car requirements. Toronto has not seen every streetcar route active at the same time for a very long time thanks to equipment shortages during the later days of the CLRV fleet, and the omnipresent construction projects that always managed to keep a route running with buses. One might think that the TTC overextended its route closures simply to save on streetcar operations.

In fact, a big shortage lies in operating staff and in budget headroom to field more cars on a scheduled basis.

If all streetcar routes were operating with streetcars today, the TTC would need 172 cars for service. A 20% provision for spares would raise this to 206 leaving a substantial pool of cars on the sidelines.

The right-most column below shows the current peak requirements scaled up for routes that now run on headways above six minutes. For example, getting 501 Queen down from a 9-minute to a 6-minute service would require 14 more cars. The total for an all-streetcar operation would be 215 cars, plus 43 spares for a total of 258, only slightly below the fleet size.

Until we see details of the 2026 budget, we will not know if any more routes will join the 6-minute network in the coming year.

RouteHeadwayPeak CarsCars Required for
6-Minute Network
501 Queen9’00”2842
503 Kingston Road to York (April 25)10’00”1220
504 King (April 25)5’00”2727
505 Dundas6’00”2525
506 Carlton (Sept 25)10’00”1932
507 Long Branch10’00”813
508 Lake ShoreTrippers55
509 Harbourfront9’00”69
510 Spadina5’00”1414
511 Bathurst6’00”1414
512 St. Clair6’00”1414
Total172215

The 60 new cars were intended both to handle growth and to provide for the Waterfront East line that is still only a faint hope for better transit there. An update on this project is expected at Council early in the new year, but a projected opening date lies in the 2030s.

The TTC is also short carhouse space. Thanks to the arrival of all 60 cars well before planned work completes to expand storage and maintenance capacity at Russell and Hillcrest. Part of the main shops will be converted as a streetcar barn serving 512 St. Clair and possibly 511 Bathurst. Several Blue Night streetcar routes operate with improved headways simply to reduce overnight storage demands on the carhouses.

The streetcar system always pulls up the rear in reliability stats, and recovery of pre-pandemic demand is not as strong on that part of the network as elsewhere. This is due in part to a shift in travel and work patterns in the area streetcars serve, but one cannot help wondering how much the erratic service deters riders from returning.

An ironic side-effect of a move to 6-minute service is that this makes “on time” an easier target, but with bunching as a daily event. The reason is that TTC vehicles can be up to 5 minute late and still count as “on time”. On a 6 minute headway, this easily leads to pairs of “on time” vehicles every 12 minutes. The real condition of service is hidden by a too-easily attained “target”.

The bus network also has fleet utilization issues, but these are a mixture of scheduled service levels, vehicle reliability, budgeted headroom for growth and the use of “Run As Directed” buses. The “RADs” are a relic of the Leary era that were routinely cited as a catch-all alternative to addressing specific problems. The vehicles were not well-used and their numbers dwindled as the pool of spare operators moved to other duties, notably on Lines 5 and 6. I will turn to the bus fleet in a future article.

For 2026, streetcar routes face many challenges:

  • Provision of enough budget to allow improved utilization of the streetcar fleet.
  • Service management that actually brings evenly spaced streetcars on dependable headways.
  • Addressing the validity of operating practices that hamper streetcar speeds everywhere, rather than just at locations with problems such as badly worn track. This includes sorting out constraints that really do relate to “safety” as opposed to using that as a catch-all excuse for padded schedules.
  • Addressing track switch controller issues that have plagued the streetcar network for decades.
  • Providing real transit signal priority for streetcars including at locations where diversions and short turns see streetcars fight through traffic attempting turns with no signal assistance at all.
  • An end to construction diversions scheduled for longer periods than actually needed to complete road, water, track and overhead repairs or upgrades.
  • Getting City projects that are supposed to be co-ordinated with streetcar track and overhead repairs to actually start and end when they are planned.

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4663 Arrives!

The last of the 60-car add-on order of Flexitys arrived at TTC Hillcrest on November 18, 2025.

This brings the fleet to 264 cars, although one long-time out-of-service car remains offsite for repairs.

Current peak requirements are for 165 cars. About a dozen more would be needed to reactivate 503 Kingston Road, now bus route due to construction diversions, to its traditional terminus at York Street, more to continue further west to Spadina or Dufferin.

Allowing for spares at 20%, the TTC will still have roughly 50 surplus streetcars. Some of these will be soaked up by the move to 6-minute headways on all routes (subject to budget approval, as always), and some by the Waterfront East route if that is ever built. The next WELRT status report is to come to Council early in 2026.)

Work is underway to convert part of Harvey Shops (the building behind 4663) into a carhouse to operate 512 St. Clair and at least part of 511 Bathurst, in effect restoring the function once performed by St. Clair Carhouse on Wychwood. With the longer Flexitys, the transfer table at Hillcrest cannot be used, and tracks must be converted to through-running across the transfer table runway. This work is expected to complete in two phases with storage for 25 cars and temporary pre-servicing facilities in Q4 2028, and with permanent facilities in Q3 2029.

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TTC Seeks Consultant for Streetcar Overhead Engineering

The TTC has an open RFP on the Bonfire site for a Triennial Contract for design services for its streetcar overhead contact system. Much of this document is boilerplate legalese, but the scope of work shows that the TTC plans to address key issues with systems related to streetcar overhead. Five specific tasks are listed in the RFP and more might be added over the term of the contract.

  • Overhead/Traction Power Supply Study
    • This involves a review of the existing system that supplies power to streetcars and the demands placed on it as vehicles move through the network. There is no mention of modelling the effect of increasing service, but this should obviously be part of the study to determine where constraints might exist to service growth. (The recent suspension of streetcar service on Bathurst during the busy CNE period thanks to a power supply failure is an obvious incentive for this work.)
  • Overhead Design for Interections
    • This task would review existing intersections with a view to improvements where appropriate.
  • Overhead Design for New and Existing Lines
    • The title is self-explanatory but it begs the question of why a new design is needed for the existing system, much of which has been rebuilt once for dual-mode trolley pole and pantograph operation, and again for a pantograph-only configuration. The latter work is still in progress, and is responsible for some of the extended bus-streetcar substitutions in recent years. Also notable is the absence of any reference to eBus charging infrastructure.
  • Streetcar Track Switch
    • Although track switches are not part of the power supply to streetcars, historically they were controlled through hardware mounted on the overhead wires. The current system uses antennae in the pavement and on streetcars, and responsibility for the system rests with the Streetcar Overhead section.
  • Streetcar Signal System Alterations
    • The definition of this task is unclear in that there are almost no signals anywhere on the streetcar system. Moreover, there is no reference to the interface between streetcar operations and traffic signals.

In this article I will address only the last two items as they are both related to issues of streetcar operating speeds, a topic raised in a recent UITP review of the streetcar system. (See The UITP Peer Review: What is the TTC Trying to Hide?) Details from this review might become public at the November TTC Board meeting.

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TTC Board Meeting: October 6, 2025

The TTC Board met on October 6, 2025. Many items on the agenda were confidential in whole or in part, and the meeting immediately recessed into private session. Four hours later, the public session resumed.

Extended private sessions have been a “feature” of recent Board meetings, and this is a major inconvenience for people who have taken the trouble to travel to City Hall for deputations, or remained available online. In years long past, the Board scheduled an in camera session before the public session so that, usually, the public part started on time. They should reconsider this practice, or at a minimum advertise a long, planned private session in the agenda so that public attendees can plan accordingly.

Items of interested included:

  • The CEO’s monthly report including an updated format for bus fleet and route performance metrics
  • The Peer Review of asset management by the International Association of Public Transport (UITP)
  • The Wayfinding Strategy
  • Renaming of the Carhouse at Leslie Barns
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Bus Reliability: TTC Reveals Uncapped Stats

For many years, the TTC reported bus reliability as a mean distance before failure (MDBF) as shown in the charts below.

A fundamental problem with these charts is that the values for Hybrid and Clean Diesel buses are capped at 30,000km and 20,000km respectively, although the actual values could be higher. This makes the values shown for eBuses which lie in the 15,000-30,000km range look similar by comparison.

In the October 2025 CEO’s Report, on the agenda for the TTC Board Meeting of October 6, 2025, the values are not capped. Indeed, the CEO comments on the particularly good results for diesel buses.

Industry-Leading Asset Performance

When it comes to vehicle reliability, our fleet continues to outperform expectations. Across all vehicle types, our buses are achieving Mean Distance Between Failures (MDBF) well above North-American standards. Clean Diesel, in particular, is showing exceptional results, demonstrating industry-leading reliability across our entire bus portfolio. [CEO’s Report at p. 2]

The numbers cited by the CEO for September 2024 to August 2025 are:

Mean Distance Between Failures

Ebus 117 buses 24,554km (12m rolling avg) Target 24,000
Diesel 1165 buses 46,336 km(12m rolling avg) Target 12,000
Hybrid 766 buses 36,218km (12m rolling avg) Target 24,000

[CEO’s Report at p. 5]

The MDBF values affect key aspects of service provision including the number of vehicles required for spares and the probability of a failure affecting service.

Not included in the stats is the mean time to repair which can have as severe an effect as MDBF. If the failures for one type of equipment are more complex putting a bus out of service for a longer period, this can compound the MDBF rate because each failure represents a longer outage. The TTC is somewhat insulated from this effect because it maintains a larger spare ratio than the industry average (see below).

I will review the new format of reported stats (only bus and subway are available so far, with streetcar to come in November) as part of my general write-up of the Board agenda.

The TTC appears to have been under-reporting the reliability of diesel and hybrid buses for many years, and this suggests that they wanted to make their eBus program appear as successful as possible. The historical stats should be restated with the caps removed so that the public can see just what the comparison over past years actually looked like.

Recently, operational issues regarding the deployment and charging for an eBus fleet have come to light, and it is clear that conversion to battery buses is not going to be as straightforward as thought when this program began.

Different fleet counts are cited in the August 31 Scheduled Service Summary and the CEO’s Report.

CEO’s Report
September 2025		Scheduled Service Summary
August 31, 2025
Diesel1,165 (56.9%)1,165 (55.3%)
Hybrid766 (37.4%)766 (36.3%)
eBus117 (5.7%)177 (8.4%)
Total2,0482,108
Peak Scheduled1,5881,588
Spare Ratio29%33%

Only 1,588 of these buses are scheduled in peak service [effective August 31, 2025] giving the TTC roughly a 29% spare ratio (three buses spare for every 10 scheduled), still above industry standards if the pilot eBus fleet is excluded. If they are included, the spare count is even higher, but that could be misleading depending on how many of the pilot buses actually remain in service.

How much of this is due to budget limits on service growth, and how much is due to keeping a high number of spares to offset poor reliability?

233 eBuses remain to be delivered on current orders, and the TTC proposes a further 200 hybrid buses to continue replacement of older vehicles while eBus technology matures. The portion of the fleet now being retired is not the diesels, but the earlier hybrids acquired in 2006-2008. [Source: TTC Scheduled Service Summary effective August 31, 2025 at p. 58]

A through review of the eBus program is needed to understand its effect on future operating and capital budgets without the rose-coloured lenses applied to “green” projects. Emission reductions are a key goal for Toronto, but they should not come at the expense of higher cost and reduced reliability for the transit fleet.

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Toronto’s Ambling Streetcars

One year ago, the TTC’s Audit & Risk Management Committee endorsed management’s proposal of a peer review of subway and streetcar assets and maintenance programs by the International Association of Public Transport (UITP).

Much of the review concerned asset management, inventory of system components, condition tracking and planning for maintenance and replacement. There is also a concern that subway and streetcar maintenance could be better integrated due to common technologies. I will leave a full review of this until after the A&RM Committee considers the UITP report at its September 22, 2025 meeting.

One slide in the UITP’s presentation deck speaks to streetcar operations and notes the glacial pace of Toronto streetcars compared to other systems.

The gradual slowdown of streetcar speeds evolved over a long period, and some of the history is not well known by current TTC Board members nor, I suspect, by many in TTC management. Many readers will remember the sprightly operation of the previous generations of CLRV streetcars and of the PCCs before them. The slowing of streetcar operations is not just a question of traffic congestion, but of other factors including TTC policy decisions. Any move to speed up operations needs to address as many of these issues as possible.

These include:

  • Electric switch operation
  • Track condition at intersections and associated slow orders
  • Overhead condition notably at underpasses
  • Flexity door operations
  • Nearside vs farside stops
  • Transit priority at signals especially for turning movements
  • Reserved transit lanes

The full version of the UITP report is not available and it will be discussed in private session at the committee meeting.

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Pantographs for TTC Legacy Streetcars?

The TTC has a Request for Bid open on merx for the retrofit of pantographs on up to six legacy streetcars.

The base bid is for one car, with an option for five additional.

If this work goes forward, Toronto might still see its legacy fleet returned to occasionally active duty, but there is no further information in the request.

The legacy fleet is temporarily stored at the Halton County Radial Railway Museum.

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TTC Subway Car Contract Goes to Alstom

Despite the premise of an open, competitive bid among potential carbuilders for new subway trains, various politicians have openly argued that the work should go to the historical provider, the Alstom (formerly Bombardier) plant in Thunder Bay.

On August 15, all three funding governments, Canada, Ontario and Toronto announced that a sole-source contract will be awarded to Alstom Transport Canada. This is intended to support Canadian jobs and an existing manufacturing facility. All bidders have been notified that the former bid process has been cancelled.

According to the news release:

To ensure that Alstom delivers state-of-the-art trains at a fair market price, maximizes the creation of Canadian jobs, and benefits Toronto, Alstom must:

• deliver a product that is compliant with the TTC’s original requirements;
• maximize Canadian content and create Canadian jobs;
• have its pricing subject to an independent third-party market price assessment.

It is expected that negotiations will occur over the next few months with a report back to the TTC Board on the status of negotiations by the end of the year.

The proposed contract would provide 70 new trains

  • 55 trains to replace the existing Line 2 fleet
  • 15 trains for the North Yonge and Scarborough extensions

There is also provision for future train orders that would support expansion of service on both Lines 1 and 2. The 55 trains are sufficient to operate Line 2 at the capacity supported by its existing signal system, but more trains would be needed to exploit the capabilities of CBTC (Computer Based Train Control) which will be installed in coming years. Similarly, the existing Line 1 fleet will support the pre-CBTC service level of 140 seconds (25.7 trains/hour), but more trains are needed to go beyond that level. There is no funding for the additional trains in current budgets, nor for the added maintenance facilities a larger fleet will require.

The award of additional trains to Alstom is dependent on their performance on the 70-train order.

The new release states:

The TTC is working diligently to ensure the aging Line 2 fleet operates safely and reliably until new trains arrive.

Originally, the TTC had planned to replace the Line 2 trains by 2026, but that scheme was shelved by former CEO Rick Leary who claimed the trains could be life-extended to 2040. That solved a budget pressure for funding, including the proposed new maintenance yard at Kipling, but created a potential crisis in subway reliability and fleet availability.

The TTC has more than 55 of the current T-1 stock used on Line 2 due to changes over the years in the scope of automatic train control implementation on Line 1. These would, if all trains were working, have allowed the Scarborough extension to open using the existing fleet, but only barely. The delay in the Scarborough project bought the TTC time to procure new trains.

The challenge now is to keep the T-1 fleet operating reliably until new cars arrive. TTC management reported at a Board meeting earlier this year that some cars are being used as a source of spare parts. There are obvious limits to how far this practice can go, and if carried too far will limit the TTC’s ability to restore full pre-pandemic service on Line 2.

See also:

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The Troubled State of TTC Green Buses

Updated July 21, 2025 at 11:20am:

Despite the extensive catalogue of issues with the Green Bus program, the TTC Board wasted no time in adopting the report without debate on an enthusiastic motion by Commissioner/Councillor Saxe. There was a sense that they could not wait to get this item off of the table.

However it is likely to come up again at the Strategic Planning Committee in discussions of future service improvements and the resulting fleet size, and the City Auditor’s review of the program will land on Saxe’s Audit & Risk Management Committee agenda sometime in 2026.

In the meantime, the TTC needs honest reporting of the performance of its growing eBus fleet as more buses arrive. In the short term, they can paper over range issues by using these vehicles on blocks of work that do not tax their capacity (buses that are only in service for part of the day, and on less stressful routes). The disparity between charging capacity and fleet size discussed in the report will also affect availability, and “performance” metrics should include not just how far a bus can travel, and how reliable it is from failure, but also whether it is even available for service.

Meanwhile, major systems elsewhere in North America continue to hedge their bets on eBuses with parallel orders of hybrids as Toronto is now doing.

Vancouver has the advantage of an existing trolley bus network which allows them to design around in motion charging. See Coming soon: the first of Metro Vancouver’s next-generation trolley buses.

Original Article

At its meeting on July 17, the TTC Board will receive an update on its Green Bus (eBus) program.

This is a long report, and some key information is buried down in the appendices. It reveals, among other things, that:

  • Delivery of the battery-powered eBuses is running late. This is an industry-wide supply chain problem.
  • The TTC plans to buy 200 more hybrid buses as an interim step to allow retirement of their oldest vehicles.
  • The reliability of the eBuses is below the originally hoped-for “long range” capacity and they are only achieving about 250km per charge. That is with a new battery, and the value is expected to drop as batteries age.
  • Much of the TTC’s currently scheduled service cannot be operated with standard range eBuses, and planned change-offs will be needed to cover the span of service typical on TTC. This will add to mileage and operator hours.
  • Charging operations at garages are constrained by a shortage of installed charge points compounded by limitations of electrical capacity.
  • The problem of shorter range and limits on charging fundamentally change how garages operate for diesel/hybrid buses where refuelling is quick and is performed as part of routine servicing as buses come out of service.
  • The need to shuffle buses between charge points and storage locations will add to staffing requirements at garages.
  • eBuses cannot replace hybrids on a 1:1 basis because of the charging constraints.
  • There is a possibility that the TTC will have to store new buses unused because of charging limitations.
  • The policy decision to deploy eBuses at all garages simultaneously requires that maintenance equipment, staffing and training must be provided everywhere at once rather than a garage by garage transition, and that concurrent support for hybrids must also exist at all sites.
  • On route charging (using charge points at key locations to permit buses to “top up” their charge) was considered early in the project, but was rejected for various reasons including a desire to be up and running quickly to secure special eBus subsidies. It is now treated as a possible option, but with implementation five years away.
  • The comparative performance of hybrids and eBuses in the CEO’s monthly Metrics Report artificially understates the hybrid numbers and makes the eBuses appear to perform closer to hybrid buses than is actually the case.
  • The TTC does not address garage capacity issues and, indeed, speaks of shifting the need for a 10th garage off by over a decade through a “garage enhancement” project. This scheme echoes other past budget juggling to shift major infrastructure requirements and their funding needs off of the current planning calendar.
  • The report contains no discussion of the implications of technical limitations for the future of bus service especially in the context of any desire to drive up ridership with significant service improvements.

Overall, the report describes a project that has finally addressed the technical realities of eBuses, something that has been glossed over for years. Some aspects of eBus migration, notably charging capacity, time and garage management issues, are presented almost as new discoveries even though they are not new to the industry. Whether this is wilful ignorance or downplaying of problems on a high-profile project, the effect is the same. As with a few other major Toronto projects, the TTC is saved from some pitfalls because schedule extensions give them more time to deal with issues that should have been foreseen.

The project began in 2017 when, shamefully, the TTC Board under then Chair Josh Colle, allowed reps from BYD to pitch their wares in the guise of a “deputation”. This was “facilitated”, to use City Hall speak, by then TTC Board member Minnan-Wong with behind the scenes support from then-Mayor Tory. The video is still available on YouTube. The original hype from BYD, who hoped for a large untendered contract, is falling away, but the implications for the future of TTC bus service are only now coming out in the open.

See also: Is A TTC Bus Technology Gerrymander In The Works? [Sept. 5, 2017]

(Those of us with long memories will recall the combined efforts of TTC management, MTO “innovative technology” staff, the gas industry and Ontario Bus Industries to replace the TTC’s trolleybus system with “clean” natural gas buses on a sole-source contract. We have been here before.)

As the 60-bus pilot project wore on, BYD was only able to supply half of the 20 buses originally allocated to them. Proterra, now out of business, got 25 and New Flyer got the other 25. At the point I write this article (July 13 at 3:00 pm, none of the BYD buses is reporting a position on the vehicle tracking system. (14 of 25 Flyers, and 8 of 25 Proterras are active.)

New Flyer is supplying eBuses to the TTC, and of the fleet numbers 6000-6203, the highest number reporting its location is 6141. Fewer than half of the delivered buses is reporting a location. Nova Bus deliveries on a 136 bus order are slower, and only 6 buses are reporting locations. (See Appendix E later in this article for information on delivery progress.)

An important issue when considering reliability stats is that a bus that never runs never fails, and so does not contribute to MDBF (Mean Distance Before Failure) stats. These buses do, however, count as part of the TTC’s active fleet and inflate its apparent size including chest-beating claims to the number of eBuses Toronto has. Having them and operating them are two different issues.

When there are only a few trial vehicles in the fleet, how well they work has little effect on service, especially through the pandemic era when service was not running at 100% of former levels. The situation is much different as recovery to full service, notably on the bus network, is in sight, and both City Council and some TTC Board members talk of an aggressive increase in transit service to wean motorists out of cars and accommodate population growth.

The TTC has already reached the point where it must keep elderly vehicles in service to compensate for performance issues with the new fleet, and this situation will compound as more eBuses arrive. There is even a question of where to store all of these buses if they cannot be actively, reliably used. The planned order for hybrids does not simply buy time while supply chain issues are worked out and battery technology improves. It is an admission that the electric fleet plan is not working out and that service at current levels is threatened. Major service expansion is simply not possible.

On the financial side, migration to eBuses is not cheap, and the project is funded only to about 37%. An important discussion nobody at the City or TTC seems willing to address is whether it is better to lower emissions by converting the fleet and all facilities to electric operation, or if buying and operating more buses to get riders out of their cars and improve mobility in the city should take precedence. Capital projects are seductive because they are often funded with “other people’s money”, but even the special eBus subsidies only go so far.

It is both ironic and sad that the electric streetcar system has many surplus vehicles thanks to service cuts, but also from a shortage of operators. The TTC plans to move to a six-minute service on three routes in Fall 2025, but may have to bus one line (503 Kingston Road) for want of streetcar drivers.

Peak streetcar service in July 2025 is 170 cars (on Saturday afternoons, not during the weekday peaks!), but the fleet will soon number 262 cars when the last of the new Flexitys arrives. 50 of the 60 new streetcars, 4603-4662, are actively reporting locations, and the highest of these, 4655, shows how close to complete the deliveries are.

In the rest of this article, I will explore issues with the eBus project and plans in more detail, but the last Appendix deserves to be here, “above the fold”.

A review commissioned by the TTC Board from Deloitte in 2023 flagged issues with “project management improvement in the areas of schedule, cost, scope, reporting, risks and issues, governance, and interdependencies management”. Of the 37 recommendations, 18 are closed and 19 are in progress.

An APTA (American Public Transit Association) peer review is planned to begin in September 2025, and the City’s Auditor General plans to review the eBus program.

It is quite clear reading through the report that the TTC eBus project is in trouble both because of external factors (industry conditions) and because the implications of the technology were not fully understood or appreciated. Moreover, the transition will require far more than buying some new buses and plugging them in. The TTC loves to claim that is a leader in the field, but this is likely only true in comparison with smaller systems that do not have the capacity. Within the industry, TTC is not at the front of the pack.

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Minister Sarkaria Advocates Thunder-Bay Built Subway Cars

The TTC is in the early days of a Request for Proposals for the supply of new subway cars. See:

The RFP was issued in December 2024 and was intended to go through several stages including:

  • Pass/Fail screening: January
  • Confidential cybersecurity meetings: March to April
  • Commercial confidential meetings: April to early July
  • Proposal submission deadline: July 22, 2025

We have just reached the point where early discussions with would-be vendors are to get underway, and actual submissions are three months off.

This means that no details of potential bids such as Canadian content, manufacturing plans or, of course, pricing are known to the TTC.

On April 23, 2025 (yesterday as I write this), Ontario’s Minister of Transportation, Prabmeet Singh Sarkaria, wrote to Mayor Chow asking:

I am writing to you about the importance of standing up for Ontario workers as a critical consideration during the procurement of the 55 new subway trains for TTC’s Line 2, which our government is supporting with a $758 million investment.

[…]

I am requesting that the City of Toronto recognize this historic opportunity and consider a sole-source procurement with Alstom, which would support Ontario workers in Thunder Bay and across our province.

Coverage of this appeared in The Star on April 24. In an unusual move for a government so enamoured of media exposure, this was not accompanied by a formal press release or media conference, but by a posting on the Minister’s LinkedIn feed.

Mayor Chow issued the following statement in reply:

Mayor Chow supports Buying Canadian whenever possible. With President Trump attacking Canada’s economy, we need to support local workers, jobs and businesses. We are working in collaboration with the provincial and federal government to deliver public transit for Torontonians and to support Canadian jobs. A Request for Proposal was issued in December. The Mayor speaks regularly with Minister Sarkaria and we will work collaboratively with the province and assess the feasibility of their request.

Past comments at both the Provincial and Federal level have suggested that this contract should automatically go to Alstom’s Thunder Bay plant, and yet the TTC issued an open RFP with all of the cost and complexity that entails. Of course, Trump’s machinations against Canada had not begun in December.

This RFP proposes not just the 55 replacement trains for the current Line 2 fleet, but trains for extensions to Scarborough and Richmond Hill, growth in demand, and eventually replacement of the current Line 1 fleet (all as options). Whoever gets this contract can well lock in decades of work supplying the Toronto subway system.

Sarkaria hints at the possibility that a sole-source contract to Alstom might require some adjustments:

The Ontario government will work with the city and the federal government to ensure the successful delivery of the trains should this decision lead to any changes in the project scope.

With a Federal election in progress, we will not know soon how much more funding might be on the table, but any extra cost would likely come out of Toronto’s allocation of the 10-year Federal funding plan already in place. It could be a stretch to get net new funding.

We have already seen the effect of cost projections on this project which was originally scoped at 62 trains, but was cut back to 55 to stay within the requested funding.

For the record, the Canadian content requirement in the RFP is 25%, and much of this contract could go offshore based on the RFP specs. If we are really going to “buy Canadian”, that number must be higher to the degree possible. (Some components, notably electronics, are not made in Canada.)

Vendors who are already involved in the RFP process will, no doubt, be upset that “the fix was in” for Alstom and resent the waste of their time. What added economic benefits might have come with an alternate vendor we will never know. Any such proposal would have to be weighed against the possible closure of Alstom’s facilities for lack of work.

I will update this article as the story develops.