not enough people in Mississauga would use it. LRT is not enough but LRT is excessive... Seems to me you just want to complain about LRTs in general as you done in the other threads.
You're strawmanning me. I did not say not enough people in Mississauga would use it... Where did I say this? The point was longer distance trips are less feasible, less attractive. No doubt some people desperate enough will do 3 hour round trips to work, even 4 hours, but that's not something that we should aim for in planning. LRTs have their time and place. I do not dislike LRTs in some places for the sake of disliking LRTs, it's because they're often unsuitable or physically would not fit in the public ROW. Many tram systems in Europe are great.
I've had people tell me they'd love an LRT down Lawrence, and actually I'd like that too, but look at the ROW width from property line to property line.... We're basically down to 4 remaining areas or corridors that could fit a surface tram, Steeles Avenue, the Line 7 Eglinton East area, Waterfront West and East. Were it up to me, would I expropriate the houses on Lawrence to make room for an LRT? In a heartbeat, but the costs and the politics just would not allow this to happen.
There are places where LRTs work besides the aforementioned 4 places: Line 6 Finch West is as fast as Paris T9 now, something to be celebrated. Line 6 is suitable enough for a tram, certainly the ridership would grow to reap the full benefits eventually. So I am very positive on Line 6 now.
However, going forward driverless metros allow transit authorities to not go broke due to rising labour costs. 70% of the TTC operating budget is labour costs now. In an ideal world, that could be reduced significantly to free up money for capital projects. The driverless Copenhagen metro turns an operating profit partially due to low labour costs.
Back to Eglinton West, if LRTs (low-floor trams) are so universally amazing, why are there dozens of Chinese cities with wide arterials not running them on the road side or median? We have to think about things like trip distance and population distribution. North Americans have uniquely long commutes, surface LRT to connect Mississauga to Toronto, especially Eglinton, would be highly suboptimal in the long run. Part of the calculus for choosing metro in China, is in the government knowing that average commutes were long.
Another case, Hurontario has the potential to grow quite dense in the not-so-distant future, in which case the LRT's lower capacity could end up restricting further densification as the roads and transit infrastructure reach its limits. Futureproofing and overbuilding transit (as is common in China) does not hurt. The opposite, which is underbuilding in North America risks hurting the future.
