Spadina subway delays dog otherwise “triumphant” TTC
TTC head Andy Byford is basking in Pan Am victory and an otherwise successful year. But he dreads reporting on the costs of the overdue, over-budget Spadina subway extension.

TheStar.com
Sept. 21, 2015
Tess Kalinowski

TTC CEO Andy Byford loves it when a plan comes together.

A little past the halfway point of the system’s first five-year plan, collisions and injuries are down; reliability is up. The TTC is cleaner; the staff more professional.

A $95-million cash injection into frontline service — much of it introduced this month — has also proved powerfully restorative.

“I always said we needed time and money,” says Byford, who calls 2015 “a triumph for this organization.”

Basking in a “flawless” Pan Am Games performance, TTC management will this week unveil the system’s highest ever customer satisfaction scores.

Still, Byford is confronting some dark days before the year ends. The overdue, over-budget $2.6-billion Spadina subway extension “is an albatross around my neck,” admits the TTC head.

Bringing in an outside engineering firm, Bechtel, to manage the final 30 per cent of the project has given him confidence that the subway will open by the end of 2017 — two years sooner than the TTC was forecasting under another scenario.

But hiring Bechtel is costing $150 million, including the $80 million for new project management. And still unknown is the tally for construction claims the TTC will have to pay its contractors. Byford admits he is dreading bringing that to the TTC board in November and to council in December.

The Toronto Star has reported that the claims could total as much as $400 million. Asked Thursday if he expects the tally to be south of that number, Byford says, “I don’t know yet. I hope so.”

Whatever the number — and he calls later to stress that he truly doesn’t know it — there will be blood on the floor when it gets to the city’s political arenas.

“Even if it’s $50 million, there will be a big row,” he says. “I could be sacked. There’s no question.

“I just hope that when the crunch comes, people look at the whole picture.”

As Byford tells it, the Spadina project, which pre-dates his own tenure, was probably doomed from the outset. Construction was delayed when the funds failed to flow, but the schedule was never adjusted. The station designs exceeded the money available and had to be pared back. That meant that the contracts were let without finished designs, leading to many of the claims issues with the contractors. All that is in addition to difficulty tunneling at York University, the death of a young construction worker and hard winters.

“Whether I like it or not, I’m accountable for it. I’m not responsible for it, but I am accountable for it,” says Byford.

He stands by the decision to bring in Bechtel. Without the change, he says, the extent of the damage would be unknown.

He accepts there will be less interest in other hard-won TTC victories.

Yonge subway delays are down 13 per cent overall, with a 17 per cent drop in equipment-related delays; a 14 per cent reduction in staff-related delays and a 6 per cent cut in customer-caused interruptions.

The TTC is analyzing every bus route, and Byford is jubilant that complaints are down 67 per cent on the problematic Dufferin bus.

“You don’t achieve (these results) by holding press conferences. You do it through sheer hard work,” he said.

It is the TTC’s Pan Am performance that prompts its chief executive to gush.

“It was a joy to behold,” he says of one particular evening at Exhibition Place. “It was a heady mix of soccer fans and Def Leppard fans all heading for the streetcars.”

The vehicles were lined up bumper to bumper to take people home. What the customers didn’t see was a lineup of buses around the corner, “just in case.”

Byford is convinced that the TTC can regain its 1980s reputation as the jewel in the crown of North American transit. He has his eye on the American Public Transit Association’s top honour, bestowed on GO Transit two years ago.

“If they can do it, we can do it,” he scoffs.

It will never be as modern as some Asian and European transit systems, but Byford insists that in five years the TTC can deliver on a par with the best in the world.

TTC status report
TTC CEO Andy Byford on the state of the system’s five megaprojects:

Presto
Presto card readers are in 26 subway stations and at all gates at Union Station. The TTC board has agreed to replace 450 turnstiles with new gates. Streetcars will all be Presto-equipped by the end of 2015. Buses and remaining stations will be fitted by the end of 2016, a year ahead of an earlier scheduled completion.

“In the first quarter of 2017, there’s a few things we want to finish off. We then want to bring in open payment, which is where you can use your phone, your debit card, your credit card, because that’s the next generation. This version of Presto we’re getting is able to do that.”

Streetcars
Bombardier has finally turned the corner on its production of the 204 low-floor vehicles the city ordered for $1.2 billion. The tenth streetcar is now being commissioned, and an 11th is en route. There should be 20 delivered to the TTC by the end of the year, which is still short of the 73 originally promised for 2015.

“We could have had 50 on property, but they wouldn’t have been on the road; they would have been in the garage. We had to get the quality right.”

Automatic train control (ATC)
The $526-million subway upgrade, from 1954 block signalling to a computerized system that will increase the Yonge subway capacity by allowing trains to run closer together, has been simplified. The first phase will be from St. Clair to Downsview stations; phase two will be the Spadina subway extension.

“The more complex a project, the more the risk to schedule and cost,” said Byford. “We remain on-target, on-budget for the finish date in 2019. I feel much more comfortable about that.”

Toronto York Spadina subway extension (TYSSE)
Originally expected to open this year, the six-stop extension to the Vaughan Metropolitan Centre is now tracking for late 2017. Some stations are 80 per cent complete, although the York University stop is still only about 40 per cent finished. Byford promises the stations will be light, modern and beautiful.

TTC culture
By Thanksgiving all TTC workers will be sporting new uniforms. Former Deloitte executive Jody Humble, hired as director of change management, will accelerate a plan to respond to concerns identified in the first employee survey, ranging from the “disgusting” state of staff washrooms to the need to have the right tools for the job. (Humble’s position was paid for by eliminating others.) She will also identify and try to mitigate resistance to changes in the TTC’s traditional job structure.

“You cannot be world-class if the vehicles are nice and shiny, the service is on time — but (it has) very inconsistent, patchy, even unfriendly service.”