Infrastructure’s not what it used to be. In Toronto, most of it is old and getting older. Even worse, it is no longer the heroic mission of a proud city, but a burden no one wants to shoulder.

Though we’ve had good times and bad, Toronto has never been able to wrap its collective brain around infrastructure issues. A local plebiscite turned down a subway as far back as 1912, an act of singular short-sightedness that hampers the city to this day.

Torontonians would eventually change their minds about a subway — they finally said yes in 1946 — but the city’s aversion to public works has reached the stage where it will cost billions of dollars to bring the civic infrastructure back to a state of good repair.

At this point, one wonders whether that’s possible. If history tells us anything about Toronto it is that change comes because of a few dominant individuals, not the actions of the many.

Enlightened and powerful city bureaucrats such as R.C. Harris and Dr. Charles Hastings understood their role as that of city-builder. Interestingly, at the same time Torontonians were turning thumbs down on a subway, Harris was building the Bloor Viaduct with a second platform down below, in anticipation of some future metro. In the ’50s, Metro chair Frederick Gardiner set out to bring this dusty provincial burg kicking and screaming into the modern age.

Power has since shifted from the bureaucracy to city council, now professionalized and ensconced. Until the ’50s, don’t forget, Toronto mayors were elected to a one-year term. Their political careers tended to be shorter than today, when the advantages of incumbency are almost insurmountable. In retrospect, one gets the impression Toronto was run by a consortium of local civic servants and provincial cabinet ministers.

But by the end of the ’60s, the idealism had disappeared and infrastructure was the last thing on anyone’s mind. The big projects had been started and the new priority was to keep one step ahead of suburbia as it spread across the hinterland.

Civic-mindedness gave way to an enhanced sense of individualism; it’s debatable whether Torontonians today would be willing to make the kind of sacrifices needed to undertake something as enormous as, say, the Yonge subway.

Politicians, fixated on debt and deficit, preached against government, which was too big. Neglect became enshrined in public policy and infrastructure became a symbol of statism and public profligacy. The long slide began, the most painful example being transit.

Indeed, transit in Toronto has reached a crossroads. Congestion costs the GTA $6 billion annually in lost productivity. Still, civic leaders continue to squander precious time bickering about LRT versus subways.

Less controversial, but just as pressing, Toronto’s water system lurches from burst main to sinkhole, barely able to keep up with demand. The city averages 1,500 broken water pipes every year. Sometimes city crews can repair them quickly; sometimes they take days, slowing traffic and flooding streets.

Most sewer pipes here are at least 55 years old; nearly 20 percent are more than 80. About three-quarters of these pipes are cast iron, which grows brittle and is vulnerable to rust. Throughout Etobicoke, Scarborough and North York, pipes laid in the 1950s and early ’60s had thinner walls, which means an even shorter life span.

So no one should be surprised that 2013 has been one of Toronto’s worst; everything that can go wrong, it seems, has.

The subway, which provides spotty service at the best of times, now breaks down regularly. On July 3, sections of the TTC’s decades-old signalling system failed, delaying hundreds of thousands of commuters on their way to work. Just days later, a powerful storm overwhelmed the subway, flooding several stations, including Canada’s busiest transit hub, Union Station, and closing whole lines.

During one of his now regular public apologies, CEO Andy Byford explained that some of the system’s signals and tracks are 60 years old. They were installed when the original subway was constructed between Union Station and Eglinton in the late 1940s and early ’50s. This says all you need to understand about how Toronto’s infrastructure got this way. No one actually decides to ignore such vital stuff for so long; they make that decision from year to year. There’s never enough money at the time; so maintenance is deferred, new equipment not purchased.

Six decades later, the situation is dire. Same thing with the Gardiner Expressway, which was begun in the ’50s and now is close to the end of its useful life.

Earlier this year, work was completed on a $29-million bypass pipe on the Coxwell Sanitary Truck Sewer, also constructed in the late 1950s. Before that emergency work was done, a huge crack, discovered in 2010, threatened a “massive sewage flood” of the Don River.

What enables the city to keep functioning despite this process of dereliction is the herculean effort of earlier generations. From the 1920s to the 1950s and ’60s, they undertook the massive projects that make the modern city possible. In addition to the original Yonge subway, Gardiner Expressway and the water and sewage systems, public health and the now defunct metropolitan governance structure also date from the era.

For us, infrastructural decay is exacerbated by climate change. Infrastructure for the 21st century looks different. As well as the usual subways and sewers, there are projects like the renaturalization of the mouth of the Don River. In the 1890s, the “solution” to the Don was the Keating Channel, a concrete canal designed to redirect the river away from badly polluted marshes.

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Today, experts are trying to re-create the old river mouth and the various natural processes it performed. The new infrastructure doesn’t work against natural forces but takes advantage of them.

The increase of extreme weather events such as the record storm this month underlines the limits of conventional infrastructure. Even if it were in good working order, it wouldn’t be enough.