In honour of this week’s kickoff of Toronto’s construction season — announced in a press conference Monday by Mayor John Tory — let’s take a quick trip down memory lane.

The city broke ground on the University subway line — extending from Union station at Front St. to St. George up on Bloor (and including a now-unused length of track to a station under Bay) — in November 1959. That line opened for service on Feb. 28, 1963. So that entire subway line took about three years and three months to build.

Then there’s the Spadina line extension. The city approved that project in January 1973. It included the curved, mosaic-tiled walls of Spadina and the strobing light-show responsive to the subway movements at Yorkdale. There was an electricians strike that delayed things for a few months. It opened to the public in January 1978. From approval to service in five years.

Hmmm. Maybe construction wasn’t always viewed as a dubious thing to celebrate in this town — an unending season of endless projects and headaches to endure. But it sure feels like that’s what it’s become. Maybe we’ve forgotten how to get things done.

Consider the present-day example of the elevators at Dupont subway station. The project to install three elevators to make the station accessible began with a series of public consultations in spring 2014. Five years later, the project is still underway, the roads at the busy intersection around the station still partially closed. Apparently, this seemingly modest construction project is just over half done: “Right now about 54 per cent of the work is complete,” TTC spokesperson Stuart Green told the CBC this week. It may, everyone hopes, be done some time next year. But the projected finish has been pushed back by years more than once already.

Installing elevators at Dupont has taken longer than building the entire subway line that station is on. Something is wrong with that.

But it’s not just that.

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Over the weekend, Marcus Gee of the Globe and Mail noted that the long-debated and sometimes controversial bike parking facility in the city hall underground parking lot finally opened last week. That’s nine years after it became a source of controversy at Rob Ford’s city hall and six full years after it was finally approved and work began in 2013. That, plus a cost of $2.6 million for, as Gee says, “a cage around some parking spaces, which, stripped down, is all it is” (albeit a cage with a shower and washrooms).

Earlier this year, I wrote about how the construction hoardings around Union Station are threatening to qualify for heritage protection after that station renovation — originally scheduled for completion in 2015 — marks 10 years of causing chaotic commuter nightmares.

Why is building things such a problem for us now?

The entire CN Tower — including the elevators serving what was the world’s highest restaurant and observation tower — was built in three years. Faster than the elevators serving a single subway station. Faster than a bike parking lot at city hall.

Heck, in the time those two projects have been under construction, entire highrise buildings have been built — elevators, parking lots, showers and cycling facilities and all — within walking distance of Union Station.

There are excuses in each case — contractor problems, unexpected fire regulations, and so on — but taken together, it seems like a pattern that points to a larger struggle to get things done. When John Tory was running for mayor in 2014, he said he’d help keep projects on time and on budget by holding weekly meetings to insist on updates and accountability. Five years later, it doesn’t look like that’s done the trick — at least not in the case of these high-profile and frustrating projects.

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I am frequently skeptical (and remain so) that any provincial government takeover of such projects would help more than it hurts. I’ve seen no evidence the province is any better at construction than the city and its agencies. People talk about more private-sector contracting as some kind of magic bullet, but in these cases (and others such as the delivery of new streetcars) the problems are often pinpointed with the private contractors. I don’t know what the solution is.

But it shouldn’t take longer to install elevators in one station than it used to take us to build an entire subway line. Six years or more for an elevator!

The tunnel under the English Channel connecting the U.K. to mainland Europe — a 50-kilometre length carrying trains and automobiles 75 metres under the sea bed — was built in six years, and that’s an engineering wonder of the world. In Toronto, we’re just left to wonder what exactly in the world has gone so wrong.

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