Getting there may be half the fun, but not so much when you have to walk the recently opened extension to Toronto’s PATH system.

This is the elevated walkway that runs south from the Air Canada Centre/Union Station all the way to the RBC WaterPark Place III office tower on Queens Quay. Though the pedestrian route is an instant hit — especially among the thousands who live and work (or both) in the South Core neighbourhood or the larger waterfront — why does it have to be so dreary?

Yes, we know, parts of it go though an active construction site, which is admirable, but for much of its length it feels like an impromptu tour of emergency exits and normally deserted painted concrete passageways that lead God-knows-where.

The best stretches are the footbridges that reach between buildings beneath the Gardiner Expressway and across York and Harbour streets. They have low ceilings, glass walls and are consciously designed, not simply carved out of what appears to be leftover interior space. But if the underside of the crumbling expressway is your thing, this is your spot.

Much of the new PATH will no doubt be changed as work finishes, but it’s curious how users are generally ignored.

The ACC, for example, barely bothers to turn the lights up outside of game time or a concert night. It’s the same thing at Union Station — also a construction site — much of which seems plunged in semi-darkness most of the time.

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The PATH entrance from the ACC lobby, a set of three steel doors with a sign above, couldn’t be less prepossessing, easier to miss or more of an afterthought. Except for the fact the stairs on the other side go up not down, this could be a service entrance.

When the walkway finally emerges in WaterPark Place, it opens up into a large food court in a remade tower that looks brand new. It’s as if this is the reward for the urban hikers who have made the trip from north to south.

It’s interesting, though, how we must create these parallel infrastructures, one layered atop the other, just to be able to get around our own obstacles. No single system by itself is up to the challenge of providing mobility to drivers and pedestrians. One or the other, perhaps, but in Toronto they must be segregated, not just for the safety of the latter but for the convenience of the former.

The city has outgrown itself. It can’t keep up. When the Gardiner was constructed in the 1950s and ’60s, people weren’t supposed to live and work on the waterfront. Now they do, and the sidewalks are nor longer enough.

It’s easier — and faster — for developers simply to continue the PATH by any means than wait for the city to do the right thing for pedestrians. Indeed, chances are that official Toronto will do all it can to ensure that things remain exactly as they are. Even the excessively modest proposal to take the Gardiner down east of Jarvis scares a good many Torontonians, elected or otherwise.

Developers are years ahead of civic planners and politicians still busy trying to suburbanize the city. For the most part, Toronto has resisted their efforts — witness the new PATH — but plenty of damage has been done, much of it down by the waterfront where the Gardiner still looms over the city like some ruin of a collapsed civilization that is forgotten but not gone.

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For all the parrot talk about sustainability, walkability and the like, the city’s record is not impressive. As the newly extended PATH system reminds us, talk and the city talks with you, walk and you walk alone.