TTC riders on Spadina and Bathurst will be the first to ride the city’s long-anticipated new streetcars when they roll out next year. Kingston Rd. and Carlton car riders, however, will be waiting until 2018 to 2019 for their turn.

An implementation plan for the new fleet of accessible, air-conditioned Bombardier streetcars shows that some routes will have less frequent service in the rush hours. In some cases riders will wait more than an extra two minutes.

But the less frequent service will be offset by bigger capacity and greater reliability, promised TTC spokesman Brad Ross.

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“We would argue that what’s more important than a scheduled headway (frequency) is reliability. With a larger car you eliminate some of the issues you run into with bunching. If you have greater headways, you in theory have improved reliability,” said Ross.

The new longer streetcars can carry up to 251 riders, nearly twice as many as one of the current CLRV streetcars and more than the 204 people who can pack onto one of the articulated cars currently running on the TTC’s 11 downtown routes.

But there will be fewer of the new models, with only 204 in the new fleet compared with 247 of the existing ALRVs and CLRVs. Only about 190 streetcars are in service each day; the rest are in maintenance. But there will always be some cars in the new fleet also in maintenance, Ross said.

“We’re doing Spadina first because we wanted the first streetcar to be on a right-of-way, on a route with a terminal where the stations are accessible — Spadina and Union,” he said.

It hasn’t been decided whether the old fleet and the new will co-exist on the same route as the newer cars roll out.

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