Regardless of how much you praise Hurontario's success as a bus route, that doesn't change the fact that very few people are using it to get on or off in the empty fields north of Cooksville station.
Commerce and pedestrian streets are a lot better suited for a road which is not used by thousands of trucks and commuters as a bypass between multiple freeways. That's what Hurontario's main function is in this stretch, and it's due to the fact that it is the one connection to so many limited-access freeways in the area.
Obviously you have never used the 19 if you think not many people get on/off north of Cooksville station.
The 19 is very busy route with people getting on/off at each and every stop between Bristol and the QEW. Most people travelling this route travel
short distances. That's why the express buses (102 and 202) have so few riders.
Obviously, most of the demand in this corridor is for
short distance travel, so your claims about Hurontario being akin to a highway bypass are simply untrue.
If Hurontario was like a highway bypass, if the demand for long distance travel was so high, as you claim, then it would have been reflected in poor local transit ridership. And Hurontario corridor does not have poor local transit ridership.
The fact is, probably the vast majority of people in the GTA have never even seen the Hurontario corridor. It is simply not a corridor with a lot of regional importance. It is not the main connection between the 401 and the QEW - the 403, 407, 427 already do that. And you will find
a lot more trucks along Mavis or Dixie than Hurontario.
Mississauga overall is not a suburb with a high dependence on Toronto. It has a huge and distinct employment base of its own, which was why MT was hit so hard by the recession, and TTC has not suffered at all. People in Mississauga simply don't commute long distances.
To transform Hurontario in this section, and basically any point from Cooksville station, north to the 403 interchange, and the nearby 401 interchange and 407 interchange would be a very very difficult task.
Hurontario is far more redevelopable than most, if not all, of the corridors in Transit City.
Even putting an LRT down the middle alone will make a huge difference in terms of pedestrian friendliness. Add parallel parking bays and it will make redevelopment even easier. As an added bonus, the LRT and parking together should calm traffic a lot, improve traffic a lot, as well as shield pedestrians.