When you're in a streetcar that has to stop at every red light on top of having to stop at stations that are placed way too close together, the car becomes far more competitive and useful at all times outside of rush hour.
Assertion that the stops are placed too close together. Looking at Google Maps measurements, the only stops I see that are not reasonably spaced out are Kennedy - Ionview and Warden - Hakimi Lebovic. All of the other inter-stop segments average half a kilometre between stops (the average stop spacing on the Danforth line), with some extremes such as Victoria Park - Sloane and Sloane - Wynford being almost 1 km apart. Just how far apart do you expect the stops to be?
Moreover, your point could very well apply to all forms of suburban transit outside rush hour. As of right now (12:32 PM as I type this post), if I was starting from Kennedy and Eglinton and needed to get to Kipling Station, it would take me 51 minutes via line 2 or 46 minutes by car. Add in any potential disruptions, crowding, or getting off at the wrong end of the platform, and that time adds up. Then there are the personal, subjective feelings (which form the crux of most arguments about transit being competitive vs the car), such as colourful characters enriching the ride on the subway, or personal fears about COVID, or any number of other reasons. The further you're travelling, especially in less dense suburban areas, the less competitive transit becomes. That doesn't mean transit is worthless, but it means that there's always going to be something that prevents someone from taking transit. Rather than setting money on fire by building subways everywhere, we should seek to optimize transit to serve the people who will use it and be realistic that a goal of transit usage of 100% is not going to get us anywhere.
Because that's fundamentally diametrically opposed. People who are travelling crosstown want to travel long distances, and thus extra stations and constant red lights hurt that goal. You can either have a more long distance express service with longer stop spacing, or a more local service with shorter stop spacing, you can't please everyone.
See my point above about extra stations. Furthermore, what you just described could easily be argued about a subway line, too. When I have to use line 2 for crosstown trips, I find it to be highly agitating to have to slow down and stop for passengers at holes in the wall like Chester, Greenwood, Donlands. So I guess to make it more competitive, we should nix all of these local stops of no consequence, so crosstown commuters don't have to suffer adding a few extra minutes to their commute. What about line 1 and the closely spaced together downtown stations? Do you know how much time long distance commuters would save if we closed one of Queen/King or St. Andrew/Osgoode? As you yourself said in your post, you can't please everyone, and making transit less useful for people at stops along the line so that crosstown travellers don't have to suffer a few extra minutes on their commute hardly seems fair.
Prague has a population that is 3x smaller, and an urban area that is 6x smaller. In fact, if we just include the central Eglinton Crosstown and Eglinton West Line lengths at ~28km, it looks like this on a map of Prague:
Three issues with this argument.
1. The urban area of Prague is no more relevant to the discussion than the urban area of Toronto is. The Eglinton Crosstown is not going to be used, in any large capacity, by commuters from Hamilton, or Peel, or Halton, or York, or Durham - it is not GO Transit - so their existence is completely irrelevant to the equation. It is being used predominantly by passengers within Toronto.
2. Just because Prague isn't
as big as Toronto doesn't mean that lessons can't be learned from their transit. Any idea to the contrary is typical Torontonian exceptionalism. And if Prague is not to your liking, perhaps Belgrade, Bucharest, or Vienna would be. And FYI, as a point of comparison, Prague's longest tram line, the 10, is 22.29 km long and a single direction trip on it takes 68 minutes. And they have stupid car drivers and careless J-walkers, too.
3. Most European cities, including Prague, are not laid out in a grid layout, so the distance end to end isn't much of a gotcha. Their streets, and therefore their transit routes, are winding. Moscow is one of the largest, if not the largest cities in Europe by area (2561 sq km) but when measured east-west is only 39 km across.
It also means it's wide enough to have an elevated guideway like Vancouver and not cause any problems with shadowing like you see in cities like NYC.
No, but the costs of building and maintaining such a thing are still much higher than regular median based rights-of-way, a point I have brought up repeatedly and which you continuously fail to address.
If it was built grade separated, it shouldn't be an LRT end of story, Ottawa shouldn't be an example to follow.
End of story? So, what, just like that you can shut down an argument because of your own personal feelings toward LRT? Why exactly shouldn't anything grade separated be an LRT? So that we can have more lines like the underused Line 4 criss crossing the city?
