Serendipity?

From this link to the TTC:

TTC technical briefing for winter preparation of streetcars
November 27, 2015

The TTC will hold a technical overview for media about winter preparation of the older streetcar fleet.

Where: Roncesvalles Carhouse, 20 The Queensway (Queen St. W. and Roncesvalles Ave.)
When: Tuesday, December 1, 2015, 10:30 a.m.​

Serendipity you say! Pshaw! The fact that the TTC is actually managed by UrbanToronto is now fully exposed and this explains a lot. (See: "A horse is a camel designed by a committee")
 
So Leslie Street between Queen and Eastern is being ripped up again the last 2 days because of one of the new water pipes being cracked - Toronto Water are there fixing it.

Shouldn't these new pipes have lasted a lot longer than 6 months?
 
Shouldn't these new pipes have lasted a lot longer than 6 months?

Yes.

Presumably, there is a warranty period in which the contractors are responsible for any failures of the services they installed. But even if the taxpayers are not on the hook for this failure, I feel bad for the area residents. Seeing part of Leslie closed again, even if it's just for a day or two because of a burst watermain, must be disheartening/frustrating.
 
The same thing happened on my street a few years ago. The City repaved it and almost immediately had to do a couple of utility cuts to repair the new water mains it had installed. Ripping up fresh pavement seems to be par for the course, which I guess partly explains why Toronto looks the way it does.
 
The same thing happened on my street a few years ago. The City repaved it and almost immediately had to do a couple of utility cuts to repair the new water mains it had installed. Ripping up fresh pavement seems to be par for the course, which I guess partly explains why Toronto looks the way it does.
The city really has trouble coordinating anything to be honest. It's not uncommon to see the city repave a whole stretch of road, to be followed up 4 months later by ripping up the freshly paved road for some kind of watermain project.

Nobody understands it, nobody can make sense of it, but apparently the city thinks that it makes perfect sense.
 
The city really has trouble coordinating anything to be honest. It's not uncommon to see the city repave a whole stretch of road, to be followed up 4 months later by ripping up the freshly paved road for some kind of watermain project.

Nobody understands it, nobody can make sense of it, but apparently the city thinks that it makes perfect sense.

How exactly does construction coordination - which is something that the City has been doing for several years now - have anything to do with the emergency repair of a newly installed component such as a watermain? Do you expect them to have a crystal ball on site, too?

Dan
Toronto, Ont.
 
Nobody understands it, nobody can make sense of it, but apparently the city thinks that it makes perfect sense.

The City doesn't think it makes perfect sense. There have been concerted efforts by the City to establish and follow protocols to try and get all necessary below-grade work done on a street before it is refinished. And I personally do see it happen. But it's impossible to control everything. Burst watermains happen - nobody plans on a burst pipe. There are other agencies, notably Toronto Hydro and Enbridge, which try to cooperate with the City to get work done beforehand, but which have their own priorities and will not hesitate to dig up a newly-laid sidewalk if work needs to be done. And then there are all the telecoms, which because they are federally regulated, are entitled to dig up city streets as necessary and there is little the City can do to prevent them from doing so.
 
How exactly does construction coordination - which is something that the City has been doing for several years now - have anything to do with the emergency repair of a newly installed component such as a watermain? Do you expect them to have a crystal ball on site, too?

Dan
Toronto, Ont.
I don't expect the City to have a crystal ball, but I do hope that one day they'll be marginally intelligent. It costs a lot to rip up a newly paved street or sidewalk to repair something that was just installed, both in the short-term and long-term as the shoddily-patched utility cut degrades into a pothole or worse. Would it be too much to ask the City to think about how to get underground infrastructure right the first time? It's not as if this is an isolated problem, and given how horrible Toronto's public realm is compared to other major cities, it appears that people elsewhere have figured this out.
 
I don't expect the City to have a crystal ball, but I do hope that one day they'll be marginally intelligent. It costs a lot to rip up a newly paved street or sidewalk to repair something that was just installed, both in the short-term and long-term as the shoddily-patched utility cut degrades into a pothole or worse. Would it be too much to ask the City to think about how to get underground infrastructure right the first time? It's not as if this is an isolated problem, and given how horrible Toronto's public realm is compared to other major cities, it appears that people elsewhere have figured this out.

Yeah, I refer you back to my earlier comments. Many of those utility cuts aren't even the City.
 
Yeah, I refer you back to my earlier comments. Many of those utility cuts aren't even the City.
Ok I stand corrected. How about amending it to the City, its agencies, and other corporations if publicly regulated? I mean I get that nobody is in charge and nobody can ever do anything differently in Toronto, but do we have to accept that this is the only way to run a city? Because the sum total of all these independent and ungovernable parts is a shoddy, dilapidated mess.
 
Totally agree with Amare. There's nothing more frustrating to see a road that has FINALLY been repaved after decades of neglect (Front Street anyone?) be cut up within weeks or months for utilities. I'm not saying Front St. has been cut up yet, but it's only a matter of time before it is. That and Richmond (right as you exit from the DVP) I'm expecting to get all wrecked again soon. So depressing. How long will new Queens Quay last before it's all cut up and patched?
 
Nobody is saying it's not frustrating. Quite the opposite. What we're saying is that whining about the City is misplaced. The reference to "the City, its agencies, and other corporations if publicly regulated" (as if they and their services are all the same) doesn't make a huge amount of sense, given the range of below-grade services, the actors involved and the different statutory and regulatory regimes - complicated by the fact that so many of the utility cuts are from the likes of Rogers, Allstream, Bell, etc., which the City has little control over beyond a permitting system. A recent City report estimated the telecom utility cuts total to be 40,000+ in any given calendar year, and that's before you even get into issues like watermains. The issues and players are such it will take way more than just sending everyone a memo saying "do better". Asking "how to get underground infrastructure right the first time" completely misses the point, because of the nature of the work and improvements and rapidly expanding infrastructure. It will never be "right the first time", as many of these services are constantly being upgraded and expanded.

Is it a problem? Of course. Can we manage it better? Certainly, although the difficulties are many, and some of them are even constitutional in nature. It isn't just a Toronto problem - jurisdictions elsewhere deal with it too, and just because you don't necessarily notice the utility cuts when you are on holiday doesn't mean that they aren't happening or that other trade offs have not been made to avoid them. The solutions (and there will be many, since it is a multi-faceted issue) undoubtedly require more money. That comes from somewhere - one's taxes, one's utility bill, one's internet bill, etc. Where's the groundswell of people wanting to pay to see fewer asphalt utility cuts? Was that an issue in any of the previous municipal, provincial or federal elections? You can understand where this issue lands on the list of priorities for most public authorities.

We need to stop thinking about the road allowances as being for vehicular and pedestrian traffic above grade, and start thinking about them as a shared space that also accommodates a highway of various services below grade, ranging from sewage to fibre optics. Obviously we need to better manage the competing demands for this space, but complaining that we are not properly "running the city", as if the issue is that some key people at city hall aren't on the ball, isn't going to lead us to a solution.

I've always felt that this issue is part of a much larger issue respecting how we value and treat the public realm in this city and in this country. We don't do a good job at it, and that has less to do with the responsible public authorities, and more to do with the public itself which doesn't demand better. Managing utility cuts better is more likely to come about when we start insisting on better streetscapes generally and making it a political issue. Until then, we can expect Bell to be ripping up a new sidewalk.
 
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