Johnny Au
Senior Member
It would be great to know when every streetcar serving 510 Spadina is a Flexity Outlook.
There's less than a week until our iconic new streetcars enter service on 510 Spadina. I'm more excited about this than I should be
On Sunday afternoon, there'll be 18 streetcars in service, of which 2 (probably) will be new. So your odds are 1 in 9. Though if they take 40 minutes to do the round trip, then on average, if you stand somewhere in the middle (say Dundas and Spadina - Chinatown), you should see a new one on avereage every 10 minutes or so going one direction or the other. Even if they only ran one car, it would have to pass you every 20 minutes.I wonder what the chances are of seeing the new streetcar on Aug 31st? I'm showing a visitor to Toronto around that day in the area, who happens to be interested in transit, but I'm not sure we'd stand around waiting for a huge amount of time to see the new ones.
It would be great to know when every streetcar serving 510 Spadina is a Flexity Outlook.
I honestly doubt Bombardier will ever catch up. Ultimately, they'll have to be delivering 3 streetcars a month. Well more than that, when they start delivering the Flexity Freedoms in 2016.probably late in the year, decemberish. Depends on when the Bombardier strike ends really, and how much, if any Bombardier can catch up on their delivery schedule. We were supposed to see the 510 completely replaced by the end of the year and to have Bathurst beginning its replacement, but that seems all but impossible right now.
Not all cars operating along the 510 Spadina route will be new ones. In fact probably, just two of them be ready for service that day. The old reliable Canadian Light Rail Vehicles (CLRVs) will continue to fill in the gaps until more new cars are available.
Bombardier Transportation has lost a bid to break the impasse with Unifor local 1075 that has seen the Thunder Bay plant idled by a strike for six weeks.
In a vote supervised by the Ministry of Labour on Tuesday, 81% of workers who voted turned down the company's last contract offer.
Union local president Dominic Pasqualino said 751 of the approximately 900 workers on strike participated in the vote.
"I think they were trying to drive fear into our workers. But our workers stood up to that and I think they tried to intimidate them by saying that they would not get a better offer," he said.
Pasqualino said by law, the company cannot request any more supervised votes. He said Bombardier tried to do something similar at a plant in Quebec.
"I knew they were doing tactics like this in La Pocatiere. And we verified this morning that they'd done this in La Pocatiere and their vote was 80 percent as well to vote no," he said.
Pasqualino said after that vote, the company made another offer and the two sides settled.
Company disappointed
In a statement, Bombardier vice-president Aaron Rivers said the company is "obviously disappointed." He said he will now shift his focus from fighting to get the Thunder Bay work force back to work "to ensuring that Bombardier's customer contracts and commitments are met."
The statement said the company would use its multiple resources to do that and that it is going to make "tough necessary decisions."
Sarah Buchan, a welder at the plant, said the vote shows how members are backing the union.
"We have so much money and so much great workers that know what they're doing at this plant," he said.
"It would be unintelligent of them to move it, or do anything drastic."