There are few consolations for the residents of a city under construction. Roads, corners and highways blocked, subway closed and even sidewalks turned into no-go zones, the metropolis has become one giant obstacle course.

Getting around shouldn’t be so hard; but it is.

There are several reasons; the double whammy of Toronto’s decades-long building boom and infrastructural deterioration has made mobility a distant dream for many, especially those dependent on major vehicular arteries.

The promise, of course, is that once the work is done navigating Toronto will be easier and smoother than ever. We will be able to ride public transit to the airport and travel along Eglinton from one to the other. Union Station will finally be able to handle the hordes that pass through it daily, and the Gardiner Expressway will be restored to full structural integrity.

Unfortunately, many of us will be old and grey by the time some of these projects are complete, 10 to 20 years from now. And by then, they will already be in need of repair and/or unable to keep up with demand.

As every Torontonian knows, urban decay never stops. Roads fall apart; concrete crumbles. As Neil Young put it, rust never sleeps.

Equally inevitable, perhaps, is a society’s willingness to delay maintenance as long as possible. It costs a lot and isn’t very sexy. It doesn’t help, either, that we live in a deficit-obsessed culture where everyone from Stephen Harper and Rob Ford to Tim Hudak and Mike Harris promise we can have it all without paying for it.

As a result, Toronto now faces a moment of truth, its day of judgment. Though we think of the current disruptions as “temporary,” they are anything but. The city has failed to keep up with the forces it has unleashed. But being a victim of your own success doesn’t make victimhood any more appealing.

Toronto has handled its success badly. Whether out of fear, resentment or both, our answer was to succumb to the blandishments of backlash politics.

This, too, shall pass.

But it will take time. Progress won’t be made until Torontonians accept the city for what it is: a place undergoing unprecedented change. Other cities would sell their future for a fraction of the growth happening here. The downside is the inconvenience.

The thing to keep in mind is whether Toronto will be a better city 20 or more years from now. We shouldn’t forget that in cases such as the Gardiner, the result of years’ labour will be a return to what existed before, as inadequate as it was.

Rather than fool ourselves that we can get back to some ideal state when city life was easy and effortless, we should figure out how to deal with things as they are. That means accepting the reality of Construction City and offering alternatives as well as asking for patience. But just when people might turn to the TTC as an option, the most used stretch of the subway shuts down for an entire weekend.

It’s not the TTC’s fault; its signal system has been ignored for 60 years and must be replaced, like it or not.

In the city, everything is connected. The either/or mentality that has prevailed is based on postwar notions of separation of uses and vehicular primacy. As much as we hate to admit it, these assumptions no longer apply. Shifting the focus from abstract concepts such as transit, housing and the public realm to the people who live in the city will be the next challenge.

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If we don’t know what we want, we’ll never get what we need.