Just a year into his term, three left to go, Toronto Mayor Rob Ford is a spent force. His much publicized 320-pound bulk notwithstanding, he seems a husk.

Issue by issue, vote by vote, he has come undone. Whether burying transit or unloading Toronto Hydro, selling public housing or putting together the budget, the Chief Magistrate has become the Main Obstacle.

Despite those all-nighters last year, Ford is a poor listener. Worse still, he isn’t the least bit curious about the larger world, let alone Toronto. His ideas are strongly held but barely formed.

Because he’s incapable of understanding others, Ford has found it hard to be a consensus-builder, which, in a weak-mayor system like Toronto’s, is critical.

Now, Ford has taken to publicly insulting councillors with whom he disagrees, most recently dismissing them as “two steps left of Joe Stalin.” Though some were pleasantly surprised to learn that Ford knew the late Soviet dictator’s name, the comparison was clumsy, not to mention crude.

And so it goes with this mayor. When his normally compliant Toronto Transit Commission chair, Karen Stintz, tries to help the poor man climb out of the hole he has dug himself, quite literally, on the transit file, he reverts to the usual blather about taxpayers.

For the most part, the city carries on regardless. So far, none of the damage inflicted by Ford has been fatal. But as Toronto’s transit situation goes from bad to worse, nothing less than the city’s future is at stake.

Already, transit in Toronto and the GTA has fallen 20 years behind the times. We won’t pay for what we do have and can’t plan for what we don’t. Ford wants new transit buried. The basis for this policy is road rage, pure and simple. Streets belong to cars and trucks, he has declared; everything else is in the way.

But with the cost of burying the Eglinton LRT having hit a stratospheric $8.2 billion, even Ford’s allies are wondering how smart a project this really is, especially if taxpayers really are to be protected.

Weak performances from Premier Dalton McGuinty and Metrolinx, the provincial agency he created to manage transit development in the GTA, have meant a free rein for Ford to redraw plans that were already watered down to accommodate drivers.

Ford’s predecessor, David Miller, had a better grasp on the city’s transit deficit, but he, too, went along with the notion that cities are for cars, not people. He would have preferred to have it both ways, but alas, that wasn’t an option.

As we’re now beginning to understand, it’s not LRTs that must be removed from streets like Eglinton, but cars and trucks. And if not removed, reduced in numbers. The current arterial imbalance discriminates, often with deadly results, against pedestrians, cyclists, transit riders and the city itself.

After decades of such thinking, change won’t come easily. A pseudo-science such as traffic engineering appears as normal as can be, but it’s little more than an organized system for enabling all things vehicular.

At this point, few expect Ford will lead Toronto into the 21st century. At this point, we can only hope he won’t succeed in dragging us back to the last.

Still, the city’s refusal to keep up with its needs is starting to show. Failure to improve transit in Scarborough, North York and Etobicoke will hasten their descent into ghettos of poverty and immigration.

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Whether the LRT goes above ground or below, Eglinton could well end up the burial place of Toronto’s transit dreams.

Christopher Hume can be reached at chume@thestar.ca

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