Eglinton LRT will cost an additional $ 325 million, and will not be available to passengers until 2023

The Eglinton Crosstown has a new official completion date for next fall, but the LRT likely won’t start carrying passengers until 2023.

In a statement released Wednesday, Metrolinx and Infrastructure Ontario announced that provincial agencies had reached an agreement with the company building the massive downtown transit project that will see the $ 5.5 billion line substantially completed by September. 2022.

The settlement will also resolve pending claims between the parties, including those involving delays caused by COVID-19, which will result in the province paying Crosslinx Transit Solutions (CTS), the consortium building the LRT, an additional $ 325 million.

But while the project should be built by next fall, according to the statement, it may not be ready to start accepting passengers until “several months later,” which could push its date of entry into service to sometime in 2023. Based on the schedule above, the LRT was supposed to open in September 2021.

“The Eglinton Crosstown line is progressing well and is nearing completion,” Metrolinx CEO Phil Verster and Infrastructure Ontario CEO Michael Lindsay said in the joint statement. They said that “while challenging” the LRT “is a hugely exciting and very important transit addition to the city.”

The 19-kilometer line will run between Mount Dennis and Kennedy Station, and will have 25 stops.

CTS is building the LRT for the Ontario government under a public-private partnership agreement. A company spokesman declined to comment Wednesday.

Explaining the uncertainty around when the line will enter service, Metrolinx spokeswoman Anne Marie Aikins said that once the project is certified substantially complete according to the terms of the LRT contract, “some work will still be needed. setting “before I can transport customers. the scope of which “will only be apparent after the project is handed over to Metrolinx and TTC.”

While Metrolinx supervises the construction of the line, the TTC will be responsible for operating it.

TTC and Metrolinx “will track Crosslinx performance during 2022 to determine when the Eglinton Crosstown Line will open for passengers,” the statement said.

The Star reported last month that provincial agencies and CTS had agreed on a new schedule and costs for the LRT, but the parties said they could not reveal details until the deal was formally approved.

The settlement comes after CTS took Metrolinx and Infrastructure Ontario to court last year, claiming the agencies were unfairly trying to hold it accountable for the delays and higher costs caused by COVID-19. In May, a judge ruled in favor of the consortium, forcing the agencies to negotiate with the company.

Although Metrolinx and Infrastructure Ontario described the deal as good news on Wednesday, their statement also reiterated that the agencies “strongly disagree” with the court’s decision that the consortium is entitled to COVID-19 costs and They are appealing the decision.

Long before the new settlement, Metrolinx had acknowledged that the LRT would not open in September 2021. In February 2020, the agency revealed that the line would not be completed until next year, blaming defects in old infrastructure discovered for the delay. at TTC’s Eglinton. station that complicated the construction of an LRT stop under the metro, as well as the failure of CTS to meet construction targets.

Despite Metrolinx criticizing the company’s performance, the province has now agreed to settlements worth more than $ 500 million for CTS, which is comprised of industry heavyweights ACS-Dragados, Aecon Group, EllisDon and SNC-Lavalin.

In 2018, Metrolinx agreed to pay CTS $ 237 million to keep the project on time. The agency says that despite the agreements, the Crosstown “remains in line with the original project value” proposed in the project’s business case.

Ben Spurr is a Toronto reporter covering Star transportation. Contact him by email at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter: @BenSpurr



Reference-www.thestar.com

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