It's not that Amsterdam is so far ahead. Toronto is just really far behind.
I remember posting this image before, this is the downtown streetcar in the industrial Polish city of Katowice:
Katowice is a fairly large city, but it is not at all comparable to Toronto and the city's budget is minuscule in comparison. It is a post-industrial city like Toronto with little cultural or historical heritage to draw from and the city receives next to no tourism compared to other cities in the region. Katowice is a city in a country recovering from socialism.
Yet, they build that kind of streetscape in their downtown core and all kinds of beautiful plazas, city squares and streetscapes that certainly puts Toronto's best to shame. Katowice is a cash-starved, industrial, post-communist city in Poland. Toronto is a burgeoning metropolis with the economy of a small-sized country.
I only draw from Katowice as my father is originally from there and I visited it last summer and they were actively constructing their new city square in the heart of downtown while I was there. The point is that this is the standard in Europe.
I think ksun makes his points overzealously much of the time. Despite what he says, Queens Quay is a great project for North American standards. But he is right about one thing. Our standards, values and expectations for our public spaces and streetscapes pail in comparison to even just the most basic expectations of backwater European cities, let alone the other world cities that we ought to be comparing ourselves to.[/b