Toronto is a city in conflict. Caught between what it was and what it needs to be, it ends up with the worst of both.

The most visible sign, of course, is our half mayor, Rob Ford, who comes out of a Toronto that never existed but for a small gaggle of rich suburban kids who never had the gumption or curiosity to find out what was going on beyond the three blocks where they lived. To them, the rest of the world, let alone the city, was one great black hole.

But it can also be seen on the streets where the conflict can lead to much more deadly consequences. Consider the Toronto transportation department; it continues to apply policies that favour vehicular traffic above everything else, unaware of the fact that the city has turned into something entirely different, something its policies no longer support. Indeed, our transportation facilitators are now part of the problem, not the solution.

This is evident throughout the city, where the battle between cars and trucks and everything else rages more fiercely than ever.

Are our streets good for anything more than driving? If they’re not, then it’s time to change that or accept as inevitable that Toronto faces a future as a second-rate city of little consequence to the wider world. This won’t be just because of the design and organization of our streets, but because they are symptomatic of a larger mindset, a mindset that resists change and clings to outdated notions that have no place in the 21st century.

Toronto’s reluctance to install something as simple as a pedestrian crossing speaks of the larger failure to grasp at the most basic level what a city is. From the half mayor down, we live in a state of collective denial; at this point, it’s not clear we even want to be a city.

Instead, it seems many of us would rather exist in some kind of indeterminate suburban condition moving constantly between boxes — domestic, commercial or corporate, big or small — cut off from a world that has grown scary to too many Torontonians.

The mind boggles when one hears about the huge struggles that occur simply because residents of a new neighbourhood want to be able to cross the road on their way to work. City bureaucrats, as is their wont, just say no. The transportation department’s job is keep streets clear for cars and trucks; everything else is an obstacle to be avoided or eliminated.

When this happened at Yonge and The Esplanade, a neighbourhood with thousands of newly arrived inhabitants and more to come, city hall informed locals that if they wanted to get to the other (west) side of Yonge, they’d have to walk up to Front St. and cross there. To install a pedestrian light at Yonge and Esplanade would slow traffic. The same argument could be made at Bay, where even more pedestrians take the long way around so that drivers not be inconvenienced.

In this way and countless others, the physical layout of the city enforced inequalities and inequities that run so deep most no longer notice.

In the meantime, pedestrians simply cross Yonge illegally. Interestingly, drivers generally slow to allow them to pass. Seems even they are willing to share the streets to a degree unanticipated, and certainly unexpected, by city officials.

The police, busy further south reeling in drivers making illegal left turns up Yonge from the Gardiner Expressway exit ramp (a.k.a. Harbour St.), remain oblivious. All those jaywalkers and not a cop around to issue a ticket.

Christopher Hume can be reached at chume@thestar.ca