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Toronto’s Ontario Line project has been quietly working its way along with a number of early works projects underway and completing, and larger portions of the project begin to start. On Wednesday, September 14th, Infrastructure Ontario delivered major news that two of the three major contracts associated with the Ontario Line now have preferred proponents, which brings us much closer to final contract closure and the beginning of major construction for things like tunnelling and station construction.
Project Structure
You may be curious how this project is structured and confused why there are so many major contracts, when previous projects like the Eglinton Line 5 Crosstown and Finch West LRT were made up of one major contract given to a single consortium. The multiple contract approach breaks the project into three chunks: fixed infrastructure and stations from the lower Don bridge westwards known as South Civils; from the south portal of the tunnel under Pape known as North Civils (the joint corridor with GO is a separate, smaller project); and for the rolling stock and other operational elements known as RSSOM. The purpose here is to reduce the risk seen on each contract (the Crosstown has had all kinds of unexpected issues that have required legal intervention and additional negotiation, while huge issues with Ottawa’s LRT have reduced the private sector's appetite for risk), as well as reducing the size of contracts overall. This has the dual goal of increasing quality and improving competition by allowing more consortia to enter the ring. The smaller size of each contract also makes them more approachable, and it’s likely that the approach to the high risk tunnelling through the centre of Toronto’s downtown seen in the South Civils contract will be different from that taken for the mostly above ground North Civils.
The Two Contracts
Wednesday's announcement revealed that preferred proponents have been decided for both the RSSOM and South Civils contracts, which were put out to tender in December last year. These portions of the project are being moved forward first as they will likely take the longest and are thus the highest priority given the tight time schedule the province has promoted for the project.
The Preferred Teams
The preferred teams selected are comprised as follows:
- South Civils (Ontario Transit Group)
- Leads: Ferrovial Construction Canada Inc., VINCI Construction Grands Projets
- Design: AECOM Canada Ltd., COWI North America Ltd., GHD Limited, SENER Group
- Construction: Ferrovial Construction Canada Inc., Janin Atlas Inc, Financial Advisory: Agentis Capital
- RSSOM (Connect 6ix)
- Leads: Plenary Americas, Hitachi Rail, Webuild Group (Salini Impreglio Canada Holding Inc.), Transdev Canada Inc.
- Design: Hitachi Rail, IBI Group Professional Services (Canada) Inc.
- Construction: Hitachi Rail, Webuild Group (Astaldi Canada Design & Construction Inc. and Salini Impreglio Civil Works Inc.), NGE Contracting Inc.
- Operations and Maintenance: Hitachi Rail, Transdev Canada Inc.
- Financial Advisory: National Bank Financial Inc, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation.
There are obviously a lot of firms involved in the project, so I will mainly call attention to some of the primary and most interesting organizations. Leading civil construction are Spanish Ferrovial and French Vinci, both of whom have substantial metro construction experience on projects like London’s Crossrail and Paris’ Grand Paris Express (Vinci is also one of the contractors on Ottawa’s Stage 2 O-Train Expansion). Well known firm AECOM is also involved.
What’s perhaps more interesting is the preferred bidder for the RSSOM contract, which is notably led by Hitachi and WeBuild group, who have been responsible for the automated Copenhagen and Milan Metro (M4) projects. As it turns out, Hitachi (sometimes more specifically referred to as Hitachi Rail Italy) has quite a repertoire of driverless metro systems they have built, albeit indirectly through their acquisition of troubled Italian rail company AnsaldoBreda.
Hitachi’s driverless metros are well known for their diminutive size, however the company has provided the technology in a variety of settings including with larger trains akin to what Metrolinx has required for the Ontario Line (~3m wide and 100m long trains), in cities such as Rome, Taipei, and Honolulu.
Interestingly, Hitachi is also undergoing a major acquisition of Thales, who has a large Toronto presence and is well known for creating signalling for automated train systems such as the entire Vancouver SkyTrain as well as Ottawa’s O-Train Confederation Line.
All of this is fascinating given that Alstom seemed more likely to be the potential winner of the RSSOM bid given their work on the similar (in specification) Montreal REM project and their Canadian origins and footprint (via their acquisition of Bombardier). The choice of Hitachi may imply trains would be imported from overseas as Hitachi does not have a Canadian manufacturing presence, which was the case for the Hyundai trains used on Vancouver's Canada Line that came from South Korea, as well as the Montreal REM trains from Alstom that were manufactured in India.
Is it really happening? How long will Construction take?
Given the importance of the Ontario Line to the Provincial government’s transit plans and its re-election this year, in addition to the continued progression of the Ontario Line procurement, it seems very unlikely that plans for the project will change in a major way. That being said, under the P3 model, it is possible for proponents to propose changes to the proposal originally made by Metrolinx for purposes of better design and constructability.
Construction for the Ontario Line is supposed to wrap up around 2030, and while this does seem like a relatively short timeline based on the experience the city has had with the Eglinton Line 5 Crosstown, the conditions are slightly different here. For one, lessons learned from the Crosstown, most notably with the difficulty of the work at Eglinton Station, have influenced design decisions around interchanges, at the same time, the phased contracting is meant to get the hardest parts of the project (the downtown tunnel) started first. This is something regular UrbanToronto forum users will appreciate as the Crosstown’s surface section flew through construction while the much more complex underground section has been slower going. For what it’s worth, I think it’s important to remember that subways need not take a decade to complete: Vancouver’s Canada Line was for example completed in less than four years in the lead up to the 2010 Olympic games, despite a large part of that project being in both bored and cut-and-cover tunnels. The Ontario Line is obviously a much more complicated project, but a 7 or 8 year timeline to completion hardly seems out of the realm of possibility - especially with the experienced contractors building the project.
What’s for sure is that the Ontario Line, when completed, will change Toronto forever.
UrbanToronto will continue to follow progress on this rapid transit project. If you'd like, you can join in on the conversation in our dedicated Forum thread, or leave a comment in the space provided on this page.
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EDITOR'S NOTE: This story has been edited to correct the definition of the North Civils section.
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