As someone who regularly attends a wide variety of parks through necessity, I'm acutely aware of the perpetual frustration caused by all the things you listed. A lot of the problems in our parks really seem illogical to me, as if the people who design them don't use them or have no intuitive common sense as to which glaringly obvious features should be mandatory...
There are a few different types of issues at play.
1) Policy:
Here I mean directives that say 'Thou shalt' when designing a space, whether that's done in-house or by a third-party designer.
The policy bar is set low in many respects. Washrooms are not mandated in park design for a standard park, they are mandated at the regional/legacy park level, a few other described circumstances and generally where they are already offered.
That's a choice; part of it is money, washrooms have maintence costs and the City is loathe to boost the Parks operating budget to cover those, so Parks tries to avoid taking on new obligations.
There's generally no mandate around minimum levels of certain types of seats (ie. with back rest, or with table).
There's no mandate around BBQs (the fixed ones); which used to be common in Metro Parks, but generally the City has not replaced them as they have failed.
2) Organization:
Under Mayor Miller a choice was made to take most staff away from specific parks. Instead 'flying teams' handle mowing, litter removal, inspections etc .
This was wrong-headed. While not all Parks will well maintained previously; there was both greater accountability and a greater sense of ownership by staff when they were assigned to specific parks.
The model, with some exceptions, was previously more hub-and-spoke with larger parks having full-time staff assigned to them, and small parks being serviced either by a parks yard or by staff based out of the larger parks.
There are some parks that still maintain their own staff, but this is the exception, more than the rule.
A further issue is that in a desire to standardize (parks get 'x' litter clean-ups a week. There was initially little differentiation between high-use parks, or parks more susceptible to problems for w/e reason vs the 'standard'.
Some changes have since been made with some parks seeing extra service. But its still awkward.
3) Competence:
I don't mean this in a rude way. There are some staff who may deserve that, but most do not.
What I mean here is two-fold.
There are lots of staff who simply don't have the right training to do their jobs well.
Parks Capital Projects is a unit with lots of people in it who have no formal experience in any of Project Management, Landscape Architecture, or Architecture. (the latter important if you're overseeing the build of a Community Centre).
People are being asked to keep on top of things they literally don't understand. They understand on-budget and on-time, but they lack (in many cases) the requisite understanding of how to achieve that, or how to address contractor concerns if site conditions or as-built circumstances are not aligned with the drawings.
***
At the front-line level of delivery, the City has a high proportion of seasonal, casual staff with relatively high turnover. That means the institutional memory of how to do things is often poor.
Crews assigned to plant trees often don't know something like how fast a given species grows. The problem with not knowing that is if you put two plants close together and one grows much faster, it over-tops the small one, often killing it off.
Its something you need to know.
4) Understanding:
I put this one in to speak to a couple of different things.
a) There is a very well known Landscape architect who has a great critical reputation, and who is highly competent, and cares about her work; but whose designs are often profoundly disliked by the public in parks. She has a penchant for parks as an art gallery, and a tendency towards the formal English Garden style.
She simply has trouble 'getting' how the average person enjoys park space. She designs with a certain wealthy client in mind, thinking about relatively low-use backyards.
b) I gave examples earlier in the thread of trampled flower beds. There seems to be an inability by some to understand 'desire lines' and real-world behaviors. You can competently design a flower bed, and then have it trampled.
Technically you didn't do anything wrong; except that you didn't understand how people would behave with that particular feature, located in that particular spot.
5) Funding
This is the final piece, but it is important. Sometimes designs in their preliminary form are much better than what we end up getting. Developers aren't the only ones who value-engineer.
Parks often cuts back on small things that will make a park better, or the quality of material finishes in order to get a park done on budget.
Sometimes there's a hope to come back and finish things properly later; sometimes not; but the former often gets lost as staff move on to other projects.
