Steve: All things are relative. 50,000 riders is in the same league as many surface routes, but this must be placed in the context of trip length and temporal distribution of ridership. The Spadina/Harbourfront line carried 48,000 riders per day in 2007. However, this line has extremely strong bidirectional and off-peak demand. Indeed, the Spadina car has weekend service equal to peak period service because there are so many riders. There are many origins and destinations of riders on this line.
The subway, by contrast, is heavily used, mainly between its terminals, in the peak direction and peak period. Otherwise, it is very lightly loaded. Replacing the subway with LRT would be possible, but with a very different design of the service.
I don’t use the word “failureâ€, but regard the huge expense and the associated delay in Toronto’s embrace of LRT a sad commentary on our transit history. The projected demand on the subway had it gone to STC was almost entirely derived from riders who would originate in the northeastern 416 and corresponding southern 905 and who should be going downtown on GO. However the demand model had only the Sheppard Subway as a choice of where to assign the trips.
The same model predicted over 50K/hour demand at Bloor/Yonge Station triggering the original version of the mad scheme to expand at that site.