This is fair, but you are saying is what almost everyone else has said. If we extended the sheppard line to STC it would be ridden more. Well why not extend the Bloor line to Malvern Town Centre, which would actually come closer to Downtown. Regardless of the tech it will still be atleast on transfer from fairview to STC.
This makes no sense and you didn't read my post (though you quoted it). Oh, and extending both Sheppard and Danforth to STC would eliminate tens of thousands of daily transfers, but extending it to Malvern Town Centre would be ridiculous - there's no people and nothing there.
I'm saying that comparing the density of entire cities is irrelevant. It tells you nothing about the potential success of transit lines in specific places, which is the real issue. Density is just a metric used to oversimplify transit planning for the sake of politicians and executives unfamiliar with the neighbourhoods in question, with statistics and numbers, and/or with transit technology and operations. The only practical application of raw density in transit planning is probably gauging the viability of local bus routes in a residential area based on their catchment areas.
For instance, if Sheppard was extended to Consumers, Agincourt, STC, then to Centennial, Cententary, and UTSC, you'd be hitting concentrations of people beyond what you'd get in pretty much every other city in North America unless it's their main drag. Don Mills, Hurontario, maybe even Hwy 7 once more development occurs, they're all similar. In Asia or Europe, you might have corridors where at almost every station is a cluster of thousands of apartments, a cluster of 10,000 jobs, a regional mall, college campus, hospital, etc....
but all this would have been developed with or after the transit line.
LA doesn't have corridors like this other than Wilshire (and if another corridor does have a string of jobs/schools/malls, the clusters of people are not a steady 1-2km apart *with* tremendously busy feeder routes nearby *and* seeing continuous redevelopment and intensification). LA is doing several things we're not doing aside from the institutional management/innovation issues. It's acknowledging context. LA isn't ignoring most of its busiest corridors so that it can run so-called European-style light rail out to a few places with moderate numbers of racialized persons of low income. If LA had corridors like Hurontario, Don Mills, the Stouffville GO line, Bathurst, etc., they'd have already built something on the spectrum of BRT/LRT/subway/commuter rail on each of these, or they'd at least be planning to. LA wouldn't adopt an official plan and then immediately propose a transit scheme completely counter to its goals. No Western city would. Hell, I don't think any Eastern city would either.
I think that Western Canadian and American cities benefit from the following things wrt transit:
1. Metropolitan regions largely within the boundaries of one or two physically large counties. This allows for a regionally integrated transit system to naturally develop, avoiding fiefdoms of little, local transit operators.
2. Largely postwar development meant that cities could plan growth according to the postwar concept of comprehensive development. Planning was not really much of a field, outside of landscaping and design, before WW2.
3. No labour union-mafia-Democratic party machine nexus. Okay, this is sort of an American phenomenon, but it applies to an extent to cities like Montreal, if not Toronto. Back in the 1910s and 1920s, poor immigrant groups in the US climbed the social ladder by forming labour unions and organized crime syndicates and by electing members of their group to office through the Democratic party. While this certainly raised the standard of living of poor, landed immigrants, it also laid the foundation for massive corruption and appointments to key public sector positions based on nothing but patronage. Even though these groups don't really exist anymore, this managerial "style" and way of doing business persists in Eastern cities.
4. No old boys clubs. Similar to (3), only advocating for different groups in these same, eastern cities. Similar effects.
I should mention that it really depends on the time when the city was settled, rather than where it is on the continent. San Francisco suffers from a lot of (1), (2) and (3), probably because it is as old and established as cities on the Northeast. Not surprisingly, their municipal transit operator is godawful for all the reasons we've mentioned.
No, I agree, but it's the exceptions that I find interesting. Indianapolis is, spatially, tailor-made for commuter transit lines since it's surrounded by a ring of 8 counties, each of which has grown massively in the post-war period and each of which could be served by a separate radial transit line. It's also seen serious reinvestment and isn't the rotten husk of a city that other Eastern cities are. Jacksonville is also a post-war creature and not municipally-fractured. Charlotte/Raleigh/North Carolina's decades behind what one might expect them to have. The mafia has certainly been present in the West...and Vegas doesn't have much in the way of transit (coincidence?). Then there's the time aspect...a city like Edmonton hasn't seen much transit innovation in the past 30 years, whereas Toronto was still forward-thinking back then before it all fell apart in the '80s/'90s.
