This project looked to investigate TTC track replacement bids made by the City of Toronto. Unfortunately, this data only goes back to 2024 and seems to be behind on new bids.
The initial dataset contained 722 observations. For this analysis, I was only interested in the category of construction bids that also contained a bid award--meaning the contract was made out, of which there were 201. For these bids, I wanted to see the frequency of each division of the city requesting the solicitation, resulting in the following chart:
Engineering and Construction Services were doing the most outsourcing of work during this period, accounting for about a third of all contracts. This also revealed some further classification issues, as two divisions contained other divisions that were on the chart, and each only accounted for a single bid.
Next I analyzed the bids of interest. To find these bids, I searched for key words in the solicitation descriptions which describe the work to be done. 'TTC' and 'track' were sufficient in narrowing down the bids of interest, of which there were only 5--of these, 3 were the exact same bid, seemingly entered thrice. This low number of bids was surprising to me but made some sense as tracks needing to be replaced should be a seldom process. I then plotted another bar chart with each bid by its contract description and awarded amount, coloured by the contractor that had won the bid:
This small amount of data was underwhelming to analyze but showed the infrequency of needing TTC tracks replaced, along with the potential inclusion of other construction jobs alongside it.
Most disappointing was the contract I was most interested in, the one currently in process at King and Dufferin, was not in the database despite being started back in September. This is also being done by Midome Construction, with track replacements valued at nearly $2M. This addition would support the notion of Midome Construction being consistently the cheapest option for track replacement, as the only other time a different company won the contract was when multiple other construction jobs were required.
While the bids on TTC track replacement are few, this analysis showed the prominence of bids in other areas of the city. Investigating a different niche of City of Toronto procurement may reveal much more interesting details.
The data comes from the Toronto Bids Awarded Contracts database. This data is updated daily, contains summary information about each competitive contract and how it was rewarded. Awards include goods and services.
Solicitations were publicly advertised in accordance with the Purchasing By-law, with contracts being awarded to the lowest bidder that met required specifications.
There are 14 columns, most interesting to me being the name of the Successful Supplier, the High Level Category of the procurement, the Award Amount and Award Date, the Division of the city requesting the procurement and the Buyer Name.
Each solicitation has a Document Number to track the procurement process. They also have an RFx Type, which is the procurement method for the solicitation. It is a requst for x, where x may be proposal, quotation, information, offer to purchase, etc.
Bids are only available up to 18 months from the after the contract date was created on the Toronto Bids Portal.
Records with a dollar amount of 0 may be the result of solicitations being used to obtain a pre-qualified list of suppliers for future solicitations.
Supplier names match the names that Suppliers self-registered with in SAP -- the City attempts to reduce these discrepancies by managing data input.
There is a change requested on August 14th to add new fields and increase the amount of data available in this data set. On October 7th, the change was staged for city staff to review.