Ttc
There is nothing screwy about the TTC doing maintenance in-house.
First off, Bombardier rarely does 'routine' maintenance for any transit authority.
Imagine sending a TTC subway car back to Thunder Bay for routine work?
How would you get it there? It would have to be moved to Greenwood and loaded on to a CN Flatbed Car (or trucked), it would take 2 days just to get into T-Bay; to do a few hours work; then 2 more days to send it back!
The cost of this arrangement would be patently absurd to everyone.
Even for most heavy maintenance the logistical hassles and lost time to movement of rolling stock would make this unattractive.
For that reason Bombardier doesn't maintain a lot of facilities to carry out routine maintenance.
It does have heavy-maintenance capabilities for rolling-stock rebuild etc. Because that's worth the hassles to carry out and still be profitable; though for larger transit authorities that have all the facilities on site already; it doesn't really make sense to ship the rolling stock out even for that type of work.
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I might point out as well, the TTC maintenance staff were very renowned for their work on the bus fleet. The TTC actually took buses from other transit authorities and rebuilt them for a profit, a few years back.
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Contracting out is not the be all/end all of savings. In general there maybe modest saving in wages and benefits, but these are often eroded by the new profit margin that has to be supported by the contract, as well as by higher turnover of staff and therefore greater training and OT costs.
That's not to say that government run services shouldn't be more efficient at times or threaten to turn to the private sector if their staff are gouging the taxpayer, but no one should be under the illusion that it normally leads to a windfall of better service at a lower cost.
What the public sector needs, more often, is dynamic management that can motivate their staff to buy into a vision for more efficiency/productivity through a mix of high expectations, good training and clearly explaining to staff how this can be a win/win proposition.
See the example above about the TTC and how David Gunn (a former TTC GM) could walk into a bus garage and command respect from the guys on the floor, in part cause he could take one apart himself........ and how he gave a speech in which he told workers how much he thought they were capable of, and how if they could deliver on an affordable bus rebuild, not only would he not contract out, but he would add jobs.
His staff turned around and did just that; it was during that era that the TTC fine tuned its paint job (same colours, fewer stripes) and figured out it could save real money per bus that way. Amazing what an inspirational leader can do, and not just in the private sector.