so if accidents are such a problem, how can so many other cities (not just houston, but cities all over europe) pull it off so well?
Often by having streets close together and laying down alternative track.
The same reason that Queen/King/Dundas/College work. When something happens on one street, you can route around it.
Diverting from Sheppard to Finch or York Mills is going to leave one heck of a walk for the people who were displaced.
For routes with no diversion, it doesn't work well. They either have very high spending for operations (clear diversions quickly, bring in alternative modes quickly, etc.) OR they may have missed a ton of potential in the corridor -- a large missed opportunity cost, assumming the corridor had large potential to begin with.
High ridership doesn't mean they've maxed out the potential benefits of the corridor.
Opportunity cost (missed potential) is the reason we don't just sit around and do nothing. Spending $0 on capital and $0 on operations is by far the cheapest option on paper but doesn't do much to improve the life of the residents.
This is basic business math. The value of the corridor is worth $P (maximum potential) if you spend $C capital with $O operating costs. Please note that potential for a city includes direct (farebox) and indirect benefits (business/residential growth, environmental benefits, etc.). The maximum potential maximum impact to the quality of life of Torontonians.
We will need to assign a dollar value for quality of life.
If you spend $C - c and achieve $P - p potential with operating costs at $O - o, you had better hope that $c is larger than ($p + $o) * 20 years.
In most business cases the total cost for any given implementation ends up being pretty much the same. If you reduce the capital, you miss out on some potential.
That is, the total long term cost is the pretty much the same regardless of implementation, including building nothing. For the city, you sacrifice quality of life for cash on hand. To simplify things, I'll assign a dollar value to a transit trip to reflect the benefits of that trip being made that way.
You might assign a different (higher or lower) value to a bicycle trip or trip by foot.
I think you will find the case to be true with the Sheppard corridor as well (Sheppard/Yonge via SCC to Kennedy).
First, start with "doing nothing". The peak potential ridership for the Sheppard corridor is probably on the order of about 400k trips per day between Yonge/Sheppard via SCC to Kennedy station linking with the SCC.
Total cost is about $5B for subway that entire length, which could achieve the peak potential ridership. LRT in PROW will not (read Soberman report on SRT to find out why). LRT in ROW with mixed intersections will not.
The trick is determining the "value of a ride". Congestion, environment, economic growth, etc. all factor in to it. What could the economy be like. What impact has it had to the cost of living, etc.
People want transit, and today it costs about $5 per trip. $5 is about the sum of capital subsidies, operational subsidies, and customer revenue. We know the value of public transit is higher than the cost (otherwise we would all drive in Toronto) so lets go with a value of $7 per transit trip to reflect the downtown cores economic growth resulting from the subway.
Starting with doing nothing (no busses or anything), we have:
C = $0
R = $0
O = $0
Opportunity Cost = (value of a single ride: $7) * (400k * 52 * 5 * 20) = $14.56B over 20 years.
Total cost of doing absolutely nothing (not running busses or anything) is about $14.56B over 20 years if you believe the $7 value for a ride which I pulled out of thin air. Use your own number to represent the value of a transit trip. Some European cities put the value at much higher than $7 CDN.
Frankly, I would believe it. The amount of tax revenue that the feds and province pull out of the city is huge on an annual basis. A large chunk of that comes from the downtown core. The downtown core growth is based (for transportation) almost exclusively on public transit investments.
If we don't invest in any additional growth, the city stagnates and will not grow economically. Lost opportunity.
Go from there and plug in the numbers for LRT, subway, busses, etc. LRT and busses will not achieve full potential for this corridor BUT they could get enough of the opportunity cost to make savings on capital worth while -- I just find it highly unlikely.
Subway with borrowed capital:
Capital: $5B + (interest over 10 years) -- so say $9B in total
Operations: Estimating about $175M per year * 20 years
Farebox revenue: 400k trips * $1.5 per trip * 52 * 5 = $156M per year * 20 years
Opportinuty Cost: See above: $14.56B
TTC budget is $1B. Take 70% of that to run the subway in total and the Sheppard corridor is about 1/4 the length of the entire network again -- so about $150 to $200M per year.
Grand total is about $4B in profit over 20 years for Torontonians in quality of life benefits (direct and indirect). Some in environmental benefits, some filtered through the various governments for services, some in your pocket book from increased economic activity.
All of these numbers are examples only and I not put time for growth or construction, but you know there is some truth to that.
We know the benefits of a strong transit system have value far beyond the farebox revenue, otherwise it wouldn't exist (too expensive).
It is also important to realize that the benefits (potential achieved) is backend loaded over a number of decades and that politicians who started the process are generally long gone by then.