I left Toronto and now I can't unsee these 8 ways the city falls short

I grew up in Toronto and spent most of my life there, so I'm always going to have a lot of love for the city.

It's exciting, diverse, creative and packed with great neighbourhoods , restaurants and things to do — and now that I live abroad, there's plenty that I miss about Toronto .

But moving away from Toronto has also made some of the city's shortcomings a lot harder to ignore.

After spending time in other major cities, I've realized there are parts of everyday life here — from public transit and walkability to housing, nightlife and public spaces — where Toronto still has plenty of room to improve.

Obviously, no city is perfect, and I'm not interested in comparing Toronto with Paris, Copenhagen or New York just for the sake of complaining.

But when it comes to some of the things that make a city easier, more affordable and simply more enjoyable to live in, there are a few areas where Toronto could take some serious notes.

Here are eight ways I think Toronto falls short compared with other cities — from a local who left and now sees it a little differently.

Toronto's public spaces could be so much better Toronto has some great parks, but compared with cities like Montreal, Paris or Copenhagen, it doesn't do the best job of turning public spaces into places where people actually want to gather and linger.

Montreal, for example, pedestrianized a ton of streets this spring, including seven major commercial streets.

Toronto does close Kensington Market for Pedestrian Sundays and has experimented with things like expanded sidewalk patios, but so much of the city still feels designed around moving cars through it rather than making space for people to hang out.

Toronto's waterfront is underwhelming Toronto sits on an absolutely enormous lake, but huge stretches of the waterfront still feel cut off from the rest of the city by highways, condo developments, industrial land and awkward infrastructure.

Compare that with waterfronts in cities like Sydney, Copenhagen or Marseille and Toronto can feel pretty underwhelming.

To be fair, things have improved a lot.

Sugar Beach, Trillium Park, Harbourfront and the Port Lands have all made the water much more accessible over the last decade or so — but for a city built along Lake Ontario, it still feels like there's so much more potential.