Even if the funding isn't there yet, Rubber Stamp McGuinty made Transit City policy. Extensions of the Sheppard subway are dead: at the EA last week, a city official told me the only public input they're actually looking for was stop placement. But we all know public input wouldn't make a difference, anyway, since they completely ignored the public during the RT replacement process, choosing what most people didn't want, a more expensive option that serves less people. Hopefully, Metrolinx has a minor subway revolution planned and RR191 is just throwing us off.
Subways with station spacing of 1km or more encourage extremely-high density nodes around the station with nothing in between. This is basically how Sheppard between Yonge & Don Mills is developing as we speak.
Toronto has not built subway lines with station spacing seen in the CBD since the mid 1970s, and its not coming back into style any time soon. So, we need to use a mode that allows closer station spacing. This leaves us with BRT or LRT. LRT was chosen because it has the capacity edge over BRT.
No, that is not how Sheppard is developing...where there aren't high-rises, there is or will be Avenues-style development. What's between Bessarion and Leslie? Park Place's 10,000 future residents. What's between Bessarion and Bayview? Another dozen+ towers.
Stop spacing is absolutely not why LRT was chosen (and it's not like the city and the TTC and planners and experts actually sat down and "chose" LRT, it came straight from the mayor's office). If the stops on the Yonge line south of Bloor were any farther apart, the platforms would be dangerously overcrowded. There's absolutely nothing wrong with 1km stop spacing. If a Willowdale stop was added to Sheppard, 99% of people would be a short walk from a station. Slightly greater stop spacing plus high-density nodes results in reduced travel times and more people living and working at stations, which increases transit use.
If North York Centre had been built as a string of 8-storey buildings, it would be far less successful and many thousands of transit rides would be lost each day. The same goes for Yonge & Eglinton and all kinds of other areas...Toronto has always supported nodal development and throwing this away so that suburban arterials can be transformed into the Champs Elysees is hilariously impractical. The funny thing is that Finch West, Jane, Don Mills, Morningside, and half of Sheppard weren't even slated for Avenue-ization, which shows just how unexpected, politicized, and ideological Transit City is. Either these corridors won't develop, or the official plan will have to be rewritten.
CC: Not to judge you or anything, I personally think it's BS to put on a pedestal 8.6 kms of multibillion new subway in a very limited catchment over hundreds of kilometres of new LRT/BRT networking spanning the entire city and then some. What plan is in the best interest of the City of Toronto?
Your numbers are wrong...we cannot build hundreds of kilometres of LRT for the cost of a Sheppard extension. We could introduce more express/Rocket bus routes, though, for very little money (like on Morningside). Extending Sheppard is in the best interest of the city, particularly in terms of city-building - Sheppard is rapidly intensifying.
edit - oh, RR191, this isn't Dubai: did you really expect 1000 cranes to pop up along Sheppard barely 5 years after the line opened, and if they didn't, the area's stagnating? A neighbourhood of 8 storey buildings is somehow immune to bad development? And giving Sheppard a transit line that supports a designation is better than a transit line that supports ridership and sound city-building policies is better for transit?