Improving the City’s Infrastructure
As Chair of Public Works & Infrastructure, I’m pleased to share that the city is engaging in an aggressive program of road construction and watermain replacement to improve its aging infrastructure.
In 2016 alone, we’re investing more than $550 million to maintain and improve our city’s core infrastructure, including $260 million on roads and bridges, $227 million on sewers and watermains and $71 million on basement flooding protection.
This construction work will have real long-term benefits for Torontonians such as improved transportation corridors and better public transit.
While necessary, there’s no doubt that construction causes disruption and inconvenience to road users and other residents that share the public realm.
In recent years, the city has embraced a multi-year capital coordination process to streamline and synchronize capital projects. Leading this process is the Major Capital Infrastructure Coordination Office (MCIC), established in in 2008.
The chief goals of the MCIC are to improve efficiency and delivery rates, avoid conflicts between different projects and minimize disruption for residents:
- A multi-year perspective ensures that capital work is being completed in the right order. This means, for example, that underground work will precede construction at grade.
- A multi-agency approach helps achieve efficiencies in construction such as effective work-zone coordination or joint excavation.
- A multi-stage process further works to minimize disruption for residents by, for instance, coordinating with transit operations and ensuring proper maintenance of equipment.
The bottom line is that the city is taking important steps to ensure that capital projects follow a predictable, logical and cost-effective path to delivery – all to get this needed infrastructure work done with the least amount of inconvenience and disruption.
To stay up-to-date, check out T.O. INview, a web-based mapping system showing the locations and details of planned capital projects.