The first question really is why did we recommend the procurement of new streetcars. The TTC streetcar network has 245 streetcars in its fleet, as I mentioned in my presentation. They're at the end of their useful life, and when you look at the 11 streetcar routes we operate, the ridership that we face on those routes demands a higher capacity solution than a bus system. We concluded that replacing those cars with new, modern low-floor streetcars was the right answer, and we satisfied the City of Toronto that this would be the appropriate thing to do and received approval to do it.
Subsequently, as you said, we did get a funding commitment from the Province of Ontario. The other two-thirds of that order is being borne by the City of Toronto.
I'm not sure what the outcomes of the national transit strategy hearings are going to be and what the response might be. But clearly, just this past week, we unveiled a prototype, or certainly a mockup, of a new streetcar and continue to make payments on that car. We're going to take a public report forward to our board next month, and we're going to recommend an award of a contract for a maintenance and storage facility to actually maintain those cars, because our current facilities aren't able to do so. Yet our budget is short during a period of time when we actually need to make those payments.
We clearly are in a situation where we're not sure how we are going to make continued payments on those cars, and we're not sure how we're going to pay for that maintenance and storage facility. We've done some work to suggest that if we didn't proceed with this order, if we actually wound the clock back and didn't do what we are doing, we would incur a loss of about $450 million for the sunk costs to date. We'd have to rebuild our existing fleet in the order of about $300 million. So we'd spend $750 million and we'd have a fleet that would be in a state of good repair, but 15 years from now we'd be right back where we are now.
The right answer for Toronto and these routes is to buy these cars and to build a new maintenance and storage facility to maintain them. Clearly, as much as we have good support from the federal government, the Province of Ontario, and the city to fund our capital budgets, we don't have enough money in the short term to make all the payments we need to make. This issue will come to a head in the next month or so.
Clearly, we're here today to say that we need more funding, however defined or whatever we call it. This is a city that's aging and a system that's aging, and in the short term, that's our biggest need.