The LRT proposals, particularly Sheppard seem more and more absurd to me. I was stuck on a 190 bus for *1 hour* due to severe traffic congestion going west from Victoria Park to Don Mills in afternoon rush hour on Friday. Maybe there was an accident on the 401 or something but this seems to happen rather regularly. The traffic along Sheppard is always bad in rush hour and there are many condo developments and the Consumers Rd office park and so on and I can't imagine what traffic on the stretch west from Victoria Park to 404 would look like if you remove one lane each way plus forcing everyone to transfer at Don Mills is extremely inconvenient and just encourages people to drive. My impression is that the Sheppard subway is underused because most people who live and work near there drive not due to lack of demand. Sheppard and Don Mills is as densely populated as Yonge and Eglinton. Tory needs to kill off LRT lines, move the money to GO train electrification (should have been priority #1) and push the province and feds for more subway lines starting with the downtown relief line. Toronto has some of the worst traffic congestion in the world nowadays and we should be building large numbers of subway lines like big cities in China.
"Big cities" in China are on the order of 8-10 million people, and they weren't built with suburbs oriented toward single-family detached housing. It is not a relevant comparison.
Anyway, haven't you been arguing for an expensive Sheppard subway extension for ages now? It's readily apparent that providing for a transit ROW - underground/grade-separated or not - will allow
transit vehicles to bypass this congestion, and that is what is needed now. Traffic is just as bad west of Don Mills, probably because buses are still necessary in light of the absurdly wide stop-spacing on the Sheppard line. It is simply not feasible to build a subway further east on Sheppard - it would also be considerably more disruptive for present drivers on Sheppard to excavate subway stations and tunnelling staging areas than it would be to install a ROW.
What's all the worse about this attitude is that the sky has not fallen on Hwy 7 where - wait for it - Viva buses now operate down the centre of the street. LRT just expands upon BRT to bring even higher capacity and better headways.
Spending billions on suburban subways is expensive and irresponsible. We do not have unlimited resources, funds, and time to build transit and holding out for the most expensive, most impractical option is fucking stupid and indefensible.
To take your reasoning, York Region should have held out for a Hwy 7 subway rather than building a busway that "removed" some lanes for traffic. So instead of having infrastructure in place now (as the Sheppard LRT would have been), they'd still be waiting for some politician to promise the world for nothing.
And, for the record, making a simple transfer is not "extremely inconvenient" (unless you're one of those people who think it's more convenient to go from, say, Eglinton to Spadina station by going all the way around the loop). People transfer to buses now - they can certainly manage to transfer to a faster LRT with much better headways.