Toronto Transportation Services maintains city streets and sidewalks but do they do the design as well?
Sometimes. In general, routine road reconstruction (no BIA, no special streetscape project) will be designed in house.
Though, sometimes, this work is farmed out.
Work for BIAs is often subject to a Streetscape Masterplan, this is usually done by an outside firm hired by the BIA.
To some degree, ECS (Engineering and Construction Services) may alter or detail the design. (The Master Plan is not working drawings)
Economic Development also has staff which can assist BIAs typically with some projects.
Civic Improvements (dedicated streetscape projects outside of BIAs, are often led by the Urban Design unit of City Planning.
Other projects may vary, but most follow, roughly, one of the above processes.
Every square inch of what they build is terrible
This is absolutely, completely and totally untrue. There's some excellent work on streetscapes carried out by the City.
Totally fair to call out instances where they've got it wrong, or blah work inherited from a previous generation of staff or the one before that.........
But suggesting there is no good work done in the City is just wrong.
We need a complete overhaul over how our public realm is designed, built, repaired, and maintained.
There is lots of room for improvement, to be sure, but I think 'complete overhaul' neglects the well done projects.
I think it would be better to say, that staff and units that have good track records should see their responsibility and funding increased, and their design standards adopted while those who consistently under achieve should see theirs diminished and their leadership changed.
I don't expect the same quality throughout our city as the University of Toronto public realm overhaul but efforts to build a beautiful city won't get realized if we don't fix this.
The U of T has made a number of critical mistakes in their recent improvements, which I have thoroughly documented. Veneration here is also misplaced. They have the ambition, but on execution......there are issues.
Can we at least get the City to put sidewalks back to exactly how they found them when they dig them up? In other cities, they remove pavers, fix what needs fixing underneath, put the undamaged paver back in, and seal it up. This isn't rocket science.
This we should do; but we don't, in part, because City staff aren't usually the ones digging things up, its usually the utilities, and the City doesn't trust them to patch things properly, so requires a 'temporary' patch (asphalt); but then City crews/contractors may not get around to the permanent fix, sometimes for weeks, sometimes for months or longer.
The City is making some changes on this file. Whether they're the right ones, TBD.
