As major delays continue to plague the TTC’s order of 204 new streetcars from Bombardier, other cities like Detroit and Los Angeles are celebrating the arrival of their fresh transit vehicles, built by other manufacturers, on — and in the case of Detroit, ahead of — schedule.

For car-friendly Los Angeles, its most recent transit endeavour has seen far more efficient — and timely — results than Toronto’s streetcar overhaul.

In August 2012, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority chose Japanese firm Kinkisharyo International to produce its new fleet of light rail vehicles, in part due to the company’s reputation of delivering on time. Kinkisharyo had previously built 62 light rail cars for Seattle’s Central Link from 2006-2010.

The initial contract tasked Kinkisharyo with producing a base order of 78 light rail vehicles. Satisfied with the partnership, L.A.’s transportation authority later increased its order to 235 vehicles, at a cost of more than $900 million.

The first car arrived in September 2014, just over two years since the initial order. About 50 have now been delivered, 35 of which are in service.

“They have an excellent on-time record,” said Paul Gonzales, a spokesperson for L.A.’s transportation authority. “They committed to delivering four per month and they’ve been on that. They’re building them on the schedule that they committed to.”

Kinkisharyo is now looking to increase production to five per month, which Gonzales says could happen within a few months.

“It’s always the case that when you first start production of a complex vehicle like a light rail vehicle that you’re ramping up,” said Kinkisharyo spokesperson Coby King. “So at first we were under four per month. We’ve achieved four per month and we’re just looking for continuing efficiencies and continuing attention to quality and that’s the hope.”

The news in Detroit is also positive. While the order is not to scale of either Toronto’s streetcars or L.A.’s light rail vehicles, the first of Detroit’s six streetcars rolled in last month, and the new QLINE streetcar system should be operational by spring.

It took about 14 months from the time M-1 Rail, the organization leading the development of the 3.3-mile-system, signed on with Brookville Equipment Corporation to the delivery of its first car.

“We have worked at a faster pace, I think, than a lot of entities,” said Dan Lijana, spokesperson for M-1 Rail. “We basically set a target to try to get all these cars here on a more advanced schedule and they worked with us every step of the way to make that happen.”

M-1 Rail announced a contract with Brookville in July 2015, targeting mid-November 2016 for the delivery of its first car, which in fact arrived mid-September. With all vehicles simultaneously in production at different manufacturing stages, they are expected to arrive a month apart, meaning Detroit could have all six by February.

By contrast, it wasn’t until June 2015 when the TTC had received and put in operation six of its new streetcars. In 2009, the Star reported that the city was expecting the first of its new streetcars in 2012, with the entire order to be delivered by 2018. The total cost of the project is $1.2 billion.

In reality, the first of the Bombardier cars went into service in August 2014, two years behind schedule.

Bombardier was supposed to have supplied 73 of the TTC’s new fleet of 204 streetcars by the end of 2015, but the TTC currently has just 23 in service.

In Detroit, Lijana said other manufacturers that competed for the contract during the bidding process indicated they weren’t able meet M-1 Rail’s delivery schedule or even have a single car ready in 2016, unlike Brookville.

“For the development of a project like this, in a lot of cities you see timelines needing to be adjusted for a whole host of different reasons including vehicle manufacturing and it was really a priority for us not to fall into that situation,” he said.

“It’s really just been sort of saying ‘we need to get this car here as early as possible’ and getting both parties together in a room to figure out how to make that happen.”

Brookville spokesperson Adam Mohney called the streetcar market a “true niche for our organization.”

The company, based in Pennsylvania, is the only one to manufacture and design streetcars exclusively in the United States.

“It’s something we’re certainly focused on as an area of future growth for our business,” Mohney said.

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“Our goal is always to be on time or ahead of schedule and we make every effort we can to do that.”

Brookville, which also has locomotive and mining divisions, recently supplied a similar streetcar model to Dallas, delivering an initial order of two cars on time and a subsequent two ahead of schedule, according to Mohney.

“We had a lot of the systems in place to be able to serve Detroit who was looking for a very similar design for their vehicles in a timely manner,” Mohney said.

“We also had a lot of lessons learned on the initial order that helped us refine and improve our systems as we developed the Detroit vehicles.”

Bombardier spokesperson Marc-André Lefebvre said the company now expects 30 TTC streetcars in service by the end of the year and 70 by the end of 2017. All 204 vehicles will be running by the conclusion of 2019, according to Bombardier’s latest revised schedule.

Lefebvre said the company recognizes that it has “failed to meet expectations.”

“This performance really does not reflect the type of company that Bombardier is around the world and what it aspires to be,” he said.

Lefebvre said all six of the company’s recent deliveries have been on schedule, thanks to changes Bombardier has made to accelerate production.

In May, it announced it would move work for Metrolinx’s light rail vehicle order from Thunder Bay to Kingston, Ont., in October, letting the former concentrate exclusively on the TTC streetcar.

“What we really are bringing in is more resources. We’re bringing in more sites, more resources, actually more people working on these projects,” Lefebvre said.

“We’re really bringing focus and taking the bold and decisive actions that need to be done.”

He said accounting for the unique specifications of Toronto’s streetcar tracks has not been a factor in the delays, but rather something Bombardier planned for in its initial schedule. Lefebvre said the issues that have slowed down production are internal to Bombardier.

“We came upon some elements of our production that did not meet the high quality standards that we expect from our site and we looked at our processes and we went back to the drawing board and said ‘let’s do it better,’” he said.

“We’ve turned a corner.”

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