As I said, we have attempted a "middle ground" approach, which has allowed highways to proliferate. Look at the 401, for instance, which is 18 lanes wide at one point, and the 427 is also quite wide, to the point that the 401 and 427 might as well count for more than one highway. There's the QEW/Gardiner, DVP/404, 403/410, and 407.
It's true, and it's really killing the region. I think I've said it before, if I had to chose between what we have now and the freeway plan in the 60s, I'd choose the freeways cause people would be able to go around. Of course, if there was an option for good transit expansion vs. highways, I'd obviously choose transit. But for the past about 30-40 years, we've been in the middle ground and have gotten totally nowhere.
It's also ended us in this mega-line situation. The 404/DVP and 401 are both pretty good examples of this, but there's also the YUS and B-D. With no new subways for people to go on, they've all crowded onto these two subways.
Comparing Toronto to Dallas, San Diego, Minneapolis or St. Louis is a bad comparison because the region is simply more significant than any of those places and population grow has been and will continue to be high; one's expectation for leadership in transit expansion is higher, because the alternative is a large amount of sprawl.
It's true. I see two things; Canada's "Metro Areas" are tiny compared to US cities, and it seems like the US has to stretch the Metro area of every single one of their cities so every single "amalgamation" has a population of over 5 million. If you took the Metro Area of say, Chicago, it'd cover all the populated parts of the GGH, which means we're only 2 million shy of Metro Chicago.
This makes me interested when people say that the
GTA is going to surpass Metro Chicago soon, because that means that the GGH will end up being absolutely huge. Of course, nobody in the rest of the country would be happy to hear that Toronto's an urban monstrosity of 12 million people!
MoveOntario 2020 is significant in theory with its stronger focus on transit expansion, but the attitude now of maximizing expansion with inferior infrastructure (diesel trains or on-street LRT) is also concerning.
Yeah, I'm disappointed too. But I think that this is where Metrolinx should really be coming in and well... managing transit. When they created the RTP, they took all the projects that the cities grabbed from MO2020, and put them together into this huge frankenstein-like "network" with very little coherency and that makes no sense at all. When will we get people who actually know about transit into Metrolinx?! People should really be realizing that we are in no way a poor city, province or country. I think this is being realized in other places in the country, but it's hit Toronto quite late, if at all.
If the people at Metrolinx stop sitting on their butts and actually build a true world-class, 21st century transit system, then people will be able to move around like never before. If not, we'll end up being some weird hybrid of pro-transit/anti-sprawl/pro-car/pro-suburb city, which I can't see going very well at all.