From the beginning, it has been Toronto’s willingness to settle for the merely adequate that has kept the city from achieving greatness.

When the provincial transit agency, Metrolinx, finally bit the bullet on the Union Station-Pearson Airport rail link several years ago, few disagreed it was the right thing to do. But it has been in the doing that the project has revealed its builders’ lack of ambition and left so many disappointed.

First, there was the decision to stick with diesel rather than electrify the system. Then came the failure to grasp the need to create as many connections as possible between the airport line and other transit routes, both present and proposed. Now there are the monstrous “noise walls” that will run alongside the line for kilometres.

These concrete barriers, which stand five metres tall, can be seen along the highways that criss-cross the endless suburban landscape. Whether they’re intended to protect drivers from the overwhelming ugliness of places like Mississauga and Brampton or make life less awful for locals is hard to tell. In either case, it should be obvious that such structures have no place in a city.

Indeed, they are at complete odds with the basic purpose of transit. They don’t connect; they divide. They only make sense in a world where various functions are seen as isolated rather than part of a larger, co-ordinated effort to achieve some over-arching goal.

Metrolinx has conveniently forgotten that its aim is not simply to be a transit-builder but more importantly, a city-builder. To degrade huge swaths of the city in the name of making it a better place doesn’t add up. In fact, not only is that irrational, it’s thoughtless and self-destructive. At this stage, Metrolinx’s institutional myopia, like that of the TTC, has made it is as much a problem as a solution.

This need not be the case. The point has been beautifully made in a proposal prepared by the Toronto architectural firm Brown and Storey. It was hired by the Junction Triangle Rail Committee to come up with alternatives to Metrolinx’s great wall policy.

They imagine barriers that are large chain-link containers full of vegetation. It’s a pretty simple solution, but it has the power to transform a dead zone into something pleasant, park-like and alive. No doubt the transportation engineers, safety tyrants and bylaw purists can come up with dozens of reasons why it won’t work. They will cite chapter and verse to convince us that “noise walls” must be there for our own good.

To them, we say thanks but no thanks. It is precisely this sort of thinking that created so many of these perceived “problems” in the first place. Recently, however, their planning “principles” have been revealed for the pseudo science they are.

The objective must be to build an infrastructure — transit and otherwise — that’s fully integrated into the urban context. After all, to a large extent, a city is nothing but an inhabitable infrastructure; the idea that the two must be kept away from each other is a contemporary fiction that has done enormous damage to cities, especially in North America. That doesn’t mean we want kids playing on train tracks; but the answer need not entail slicing the city into isolated sections, each walled off from the next.

Not only does Metrolinx not see the forest for the trees, it has lost sight of why it exists. It has had to fight heroically against bottomless political ignorance, but if it forgets what the battle is about, it has no chance of winning.

Christopher Hume can be reached at chume@thestar.ca

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