At least someone at the Star is willing to criticize the Sheppard LRT and the excessive numbers of transfers caused by this proposal.
http://www.thestar.com/news/city_ha...h_is_worse_than_any_of_the_options_james.html
The thing is with the Sheppard subway (existing and proposed), there was a lot of office space built along it in the 1980s, at Yonge & Sheppard, Victoria Park & Sheppard and Scarborough Centre. Then in the 1990s we had a recession followed by amalgamation and raising commercial taxes to absurd levels, killing the office market along that route. Had office space development along Sheppard continued at the pace it did in the 1980s, there would be several times as much office space as there is today, which would mean that the Sheppard subway would have high ridership.
There has been an enormous amount of residential development on Sheppard in the last 10 years or so though. The municipal politicians tend to completely ignore this. There are only a few other areas other than downtown and immediately west of downtown with anywhere near this number of condos, the Humber Bay Shores area, the Square One area of Mississauga, Yonge/Eglinton and Kipling/Bloor being the main ones. I think that if a future mayor (e.g. John Tory) has the sense to cut commercial tax rates significantly, then the office space market on Sheppard Avenue will come back because it will be seen as a cheaper alternative to expensive downtown office space that is higher quality than Mississauga. With ridiculously high commercial tax rates it doesn't seem to be economical to build office space anywhere in City of Toronto suburbs, so we get absurdly expensive downtown office space and low quality office space in Mississauga.