The TTC says a shortage of vehicles has forced it to cut service on more than a dozen bus routes during the busiest time of day.

Starting Monday, the transit agency has reduced morning rush hour service on 13 routes. The changes mean that buses will come less frequently, with customers on most of the affected lines facing wait times one or two minutes longer than usual. One route, the 51 Leslie, will also have service cut back during the afternoon rush hour.

TTC spokesperson Brad Ross said the root cause of the service reductions is the delayed delivery of new streetcars from rail manufacturer Bombardier. He said that the shortage of new streetcars, combined with the need to run buses on portions of streetcar routes due to construction projects, has overstretched the bus fleet.

“We simply don’t have the number of buses that we need,” he said.

According to Ross, the TTC trimmed service on routes where doing so would have the least impact. “Our customers will notice minimal difference, if any,” he said. He conceded that less frequent service could mean some of the routes will exceed the TTC’s crowding standards, however.

Some of the routes that will see less service are among the TTC’s busiest, including the 32 Eglinton West and 85 Sheppard East. The Eglinton West line will be served by about 27 bus trips an hour instead of about 28, while the Sheppard East will have its headways increased by one to two minutes.

Jessica Bell, executive director of the TTCriders advocacy group, charged that the transit agency could have avoided the service cuts if it had moved more quickly to buy new buses.

“The TTC’s capital budget has a chronic shortfall. If it was properly funded by the city, they should have and they could have bought more buses to deal with this ongoing issue with Bombardier. They’ve known about this issue for a long time,” she said.

Bombardier delivered 30 new streetcars by the end of 2016, meeting a revised target that the company set after it repeatedly missed production deadlines. Under the terms of the original order, the company was to have delivered more than 100 cars by now.

The TTC has 200 older model streetcars, but due to maintenance requirements and the need to hold some back as spares, only about 170 enter service on a daily basis. While it waits for the Bombardier vehicles, the agency has launched an expensive maintenance program to keep the older cars on the road for longer.

Last month Mayor John Tory and TTC chair Councillor Josh Colle penned a letter to Bombardier warning of further legal action against the company and complaining that “we are no longer able to sustain our current service levels as a result” of the delays.

Benoît Brossoit, the president of Bombardier Transportation, Americas Region wrote back acknowledging that the company “may have failed to meet your expectations.” But he said the company had doubled production and vowed to meet the original deadline of providing all 204 vehicles by 2019.

The transit commission’s fleet of buses consists of close to 2,000 vehicles, which operate on about 140 routes. Last May the TTC board approved the $65-million purchase of 97 new 40-foot buses from Nova Bus, a Quebec-based subsidiary of the Volvo Group.

The vehicles are scheduled to start arriving in July, but Ross said the service cuts introduced Monday will likely have to remain in place until the fall. That’s because the TTC will need additional buses to cope with disruptions caused by summer construction.

Monday’s service cuts affect the following routes:

6 Bay

14 Glencairn

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16 McCowan

32 Eglinton West

38 Highland Creek

46 Martin Grove

51 Leslie

85 Sheppard East

102 Markham Rd.

112 West Mall

123 Shorncliffe

129 McCowan North