“So, your home town is now ‘New York run by a crack addict?’” joked a friend I bumped into on the street here in London the other day.

I cringed.

It was a not-so-subtle play on the famous Peter Ustinov line that “Toronto is New York run by the Swiss.” Ustinov neatly summarized Toronto’s cosmopolitan-yet-clean-and-oh-so-polite image. It is a brand that Toronto has dined on internationally for decades.

I left the city in 1997 to live and work in the U.S. and more recently the U.K. When I travel the world people often ask me where I’m from. When I tell them my hometown is Toronto they almost always respond to with a mixture of awe and envy (often qualified by a fear of long, cold winters.)

As I have discovered, Ustinov’s wisecrack about Toronto has had impressive staying power. If a city’s reputation is going to be summed up in six words, it could be so much worse.

And now it is.

News that alleged drug dealers were peddling a video that appears to show the mayor of Toronto smoking crack cocaine quickly spread around the globe.

“Toronto mayor Rob Ford faces crack cocaine video allegations,” screamed the headline in my morning copy of the London Guardian recently.

“Canada abuzz over reported crack video of mayor,” announced The International Herald Tribune.

The Daily Mail seems to have a new scandalous story on the Ford crack scandal every day.

While it is easy to dismiss those headlines – and the American late-night talk shows’ acid send-ups of the mayor – as just a little bit of fun, no city should be happy to be seen as a crack-fueled laughing stock.

One of the lessons learned from living away for so long is that reputation often outlives reality.

I often have to pause when foreigners ask me about Canadian universities.

“Isn’t McGill the best university in Canada?” is a question I regularly hear. It’s a reputation that dates back to McGill’s glory days of the 1950s and 1960s. Sure, it is still a good – if cash-starved – university. But by most measures, the University of Toronto, University of British Columbia, University of Alberta, Queens and Waterloo are just as good as McGil – if not far better. Yet few outside Canada know any of this.

As we all remember from high school, reputations can be hard to alter. And the same goes for cities. Just ask Washington, D.C. about the jokes that still circulate about Mayor Marion Barry’s 1990 arrest for smoking crack cocaine.

The truth is that Rob Ford’s latest outrage is merely – painfully – announcing to the world something many people in Toronto already know: the city has not been “New York run by the Swiss” for a very long time.

My roots in Toronto are deep, so I am back several times each year. I have watched despairingly as the city I still love, the city that was once a model for the world to admire, lurches forward, passing the mantle of civic leadership from inadequate to incompetent.

I was living in the U.S. in 2003 when Toronto was hit with the SARS crisis. I remember squirming when then-mayor Mel Lastman was asked about the World Health Organization on CNN during the worst of the crisis and answered, “I don’t know who this group is. I never heard of them before.” Not exactly the ideal response for a leader out to build confidence.

At the time I could not have imagined Toronto passing the mayor’s chain on to someone even more embarrassing and antediluvian.

And yet it has.

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Those of us old enough to remember the 1970s still look back nostalgically at the era of Toronto Mayor David Crombie and “Toronto the Good.” Crombie had a vision of a kindler, gentler city. Where has that vision gone?

When I return to Toronto I still see a city with so much to admire: I am excited by the new community being built near the Don River and I think the organic revitalization of Ossington Avenue is as cool as in any city anywhere. But I cringe at the graffiti, the broken streets, the crumbling sidewalks, the tattered posters on every lamppost and especially at the deteriorating city services and the long-planned, long-delayed investments in civic infrastructure.

As a young reporter in Toronto in the late 1980s I remember working on stories on Toronto’s new airport link that would connect Union Station with Pearson Airport. A quarter century later it is finally being built. In that same era they talked about tearing down the Gardiner Expressway. Today the Gardiner is squeezed on every side by condominiums and the opportunity to tear it down has been missed.

I now live in London, England and – apart from the weather – I love it. But the Torontonian in me envies the civic vision I see here every day. London’s colourful, disheveled mayor, Boris Johnson, presides over a city that is re-engineering itself for the 21st Century. London is emphatically and aggressively moving away from deference to the almighty car.

Crossrail – at $22 billion, the biggest construction project in Europe – will see a new high-frequency, high-capacity train system cross London by 2017. The 118-km route from one side of the city to the other includes 42 km of new tunnels.

I am a regular passenger on London’s sparkling new Overground system, a six-line network of 83 stations that circle and cross the city. The Overground knitted together underused and abandoned rail lines to create a relatively inexpensive new train system that complements and extends the congested underground subway network – on the same ticket system.

On my return visits to Toronto I look at the railway lines that weave through the city and wonder why a visionary leader has not created a similar low-cost network through the city. I read about the new Eglinton Crosstown transit line that is about to be constructed and I wince as I remember that Eglinton would have had a subway by 2001 had Premier Mike Harris not halted construction in 1995.

Where does London’s money come from? While Toronto tears itself apart over new taxes to pay for transit that should have been built a generation ago, Londoners have grown to accept the $16/day congestion fee for cars entering the city. By law the profit from the $230 million it raises each year must be invested in transit infrastructure.

While Toronto removes bike lanes, London has committed a staggering $1.5 billion over the next 10 years to improving bicycle infrastructure. While Toronto’s feeble bike rental network struggles with 1,000 bikes and 80 docking stations, London’s “Boris Bike” network of 570 docking stations and 8,300 bikes is so successful that another 2,000 bikes are being added this year as the system is extended west and south.

With determined leadership London is giving residents transit and cycle options that are changing the face of its jammed streets and over-crowded buses and tubes.

Meanwhile, Toronto is paralyzed with an empty piggybank and leadership that has become the laughing stock of the world.

Now it’s becoming clear. What Ustinov must have meant when he called Toronto “New York run by the Swiss” was in fact a cruel dig: Toronto is New York run by the people who invented the cuckoo clock.

Jeffrey Kofman is a London-based foreign correspondent for ABC News.