NEW YORK — Deliveries of new Bombardier subway equipment is almost three years behind schedule, and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority failed to adequately oversee the manufacturer’s performance, New York City Comptroller Scott M. Stringer reports in an audit released Monday.
MTA’s $600 million contract with Bombardier Transit Corp. to produce 300 R-179 subway cars was originally to be completed by January 2017; at that point, the company had delivered only 18 cars. A subsequent revision set January 2019 as the date to complete deliveries; by then, only 162 of the cars had been delivered.
The delays have cost the MTA an estimated $35 million to keep older equipment in operation while awaiting the new cars.
MTA New York City Transit President Andy Byford strongly disagreed with Stringer’s suggestion that the transit agency had been deficient in its performance.
“Let’s be clear here,” Byford said. “The villain of the piece is Bombardier, not the MTA. We have held Bombardier’s feet to the fire throughout this project, we have embedded resources to make sure the trains are being built properly, and critically, we leveraged the liquidated damages.”
As part of the renegotiated deadline for delivery, the MTA reduced payments by $1.27 million and Bombardier agreed to deliver 18 additional cars at no additional cost.
“We got 18 more subway cars out of Bombardier,” Byford said, “18 cars that we would not otherwise have had.” Byford was appointed as the NYC Transit president in January 2018.
Currently, 305 cars have been delivered; 278 have been tested and are in service. MTA spokesman Tim Minton said the remaining cars would be delivered by the end of this month.
In addition to the missed deadlines, Stringer’s report noted Bombardier failed to comply with technical requirements, or to correct serious defects in critical structural components of the subway cars.
NY1 News reports that Bombardier said in a statement that it disagrees with some of the findings, but also said, “We are fully committed to honoring our commitments to NYCT and are taking every measure necessary to ensure that we do.”
Bombardier began building the R179s in August 2012 without a contractually-required sign-off from transit officials on its welding procedures. More than a year later, in December 2013, the company discovered a “hot cracking” issue with the welds on some of the cars, which took a year and a half to resolve.
The new cars were built to replace the 1964-era R32 New York subway cars, built by the Budd Co. Nicknamed the Brightliners, those cars — the oldest in the New York City Transit system — have had their operational life had been extended because of the delays to the new equipment.
