Once it was just the name of a street, now St. Clair is shorthand for municipal failure.

The words are invoked, without need of explanation, whenever the talk gets around to transit and the city's multiple bureaucratic failings. Mayor Rob Ford, has referred to St. Clair as one of the main reasons he wants to kill Transit City, Toronto's hard won transit plan.

The object of his scorn is, of course, the streetcar, um, light rail transit, right-of-way, the one that took five years to build, went wildly over budget, destroyed businesses, ruined careers, wrecked lives. … You get the picture.

That’s how St. Clair came to mean “nightmare,” “fiasco,” “disaster,” all that’s wrong with Toronto.

Naturally, the project launched years of NIMBY outrage, some of it quite nasty. Even now, the bitterness lingers.

Funny then that the street itself appears to be in better shape than it has in decades. St. Clair, between, say, Bathurst and Old Weston Rd., may not be the most beautiful stretch of the city, but it’s clearly a healthy, even bustling, thoroughfare filled with people and activity, as urban a passage as one could hope to find in a big city.

Because it passes through a number of distinct neighbourhoods, St. Clair is a street of many colours. Like most of Toronto’s most successful thoroughfares — Queen, King, College, Yonge — it is lined with an almost continuous row of simple two-, sometimes three- or four-storey structures, retail at grade, residential, office or commercial above.

This rudimentary form possesses the great virtue of flexibility; it can be reinvented endlessly to accommodate a variety of uses. These are the old buildings that house new ideas.

The enhanced streetcar line connects these various episodes and knits them into a more unified whole. As a result of the ROW, St. Clair feels less car-dominated, somehow scaled down to a more human scale.

Needless to say, drivers aren’t happy, but they never are.

Construction, however, was a different story. It became a textbook case of bureaucratic breakdown, institutional isolation, pusillanimous politicians and a petulant public. By the time the fighting ended, few could remember why it started.

All that remained were feelings of frustration and a widespread perception of failure. Perception being more important than reality, few have actually bothered to see past the urban myths to the new St. Clair.

Local councillor and former TTC vice-chair, Joe Mihevc says he knew things were getting better last fall when he rented his campaign office on St. Clair near Christie.

“In 2006, the rent was $2,500,” he explains. “Last year, it was $3300.”

Mihevc, who has represented the area since 1991, sees signs of renewal everywhere he turns,

“I never had any development applications,” he says. “Now, one project is done, two are in construction and two more are applying. The St. Clair right of way is functioning exactly as we hoped it would. It has revitalized a tired old street. You can smell the money coming in.”

One can quibble about the details — the public art program seems strangely irrelevant and already repair crews have chewed up whole sections of the road — but the streetcar/LRT is ideally suited to St. Clair, one of those main streets along which a series of neighbourhoods are organized. It is appropriate to the low-rise scale of the street and the kinds of densities it supports.

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The lessons of St. Clair have more to do with how we build transit than why; the point is not that we should do less, but do better.

Christopher Hume can be reached at chume@thestar.ca