My tone was not "be happy for what you're getting" I was trying to counter your claim of " if money goes to improving transit (speed, reliability and affordability), the majority of the complaints will be from entitled car owners" The only people I see complaining about the expansion are ironically transit advocates.
Okay, so all the complaints about Queen Street? About driving on Eglinton? About the King Pilot Program? Or shall we pull the vintage Rob Ford "St. Clair Disaster" moniker out of the cupboard?
Drivers are almost always the ones who complain most about transit, pedestrian and cyclist infrastructure, guaranteed.
Transit advocates who complain know that the transit we're getting is still inadequate (much so for future needs), and still doesn't address the problem that we're the 3rd most congested city in the world that rarely ever does anything to make it actively
harder to drive into the city or give active priority to transit on the streets; which quite frankly is one of the easiest and most effective ways of reducing downtown gridlock.
Getting a bit off topic here but long ago the TTC operating budget was funded by 3 levels of government, on top of that there were fare zones.
As it should be, and is in many, many cities. A lot of that goes back to Mike Harris. But subsequent governments have held just as tight to the purse strings.
I feel the vast majority of the issues there are cultural!
I think the TTC has a lot less money than you may think they do. Stuff still costs money, and tight budgets have made it so hard to do just about anything at the TTC.
Example: Higher ups *know* that Wheel Trans is inefficient and is subsidized to the tune of tens of dollars per ride; almost entirely because so little investment has been made in that program that they're reliant on cab companies for what seems the majority of trips. Pennywise, pound foolish. But the TTC just doesn't have the money to buy a big enough fleet and man it. So we'll keep Beck, Co-op and Royal afloat for the next few decades.
Begging at the feet of higher governments for thirty years hasn't worked all that well, when they all want to build a feel-good photo-op campaign promise, rather than maintenance and capital for less attractive things. How much do the Conservatives and Liberals want to spend to move the streetcar system into the 21st century with proper signalling and switching that doesn't have to be done manually by driver hopping out of the vehicle with a stick? I'll tell you; not very much. They'll gladly pay to put shiny new Flexitys on those tracks though.
Take a look at just about any subway station in the city. There are very few (outside of brand new stations), where panelling isn't missing, notification screens aren't inoperable/missing, etc. The TTC needs more money, as it still takes an inexplicably large amount of its income from the farebox as one of the least operationally subsidized transit systems in North America.
Even things that are effectively free are poorly handed. Forgetting to put out or update service advisories, maintenance not having or following SOPs. ROW being SLOWER then mixed traffic (st clair)
Yes, that is a problem.
But it almost always comes down to cars.
We don't want to put all streetcar lines on their own ROWs because of cars. We don't want to give transit priority because of cars (see St. Clair). Drivers–especially those from outside of the city–hold an inordinate amount of political sway here, and we've always chosen to make life easier for them over making life easier for everyone. Even our transit priorities have been skewed in the wrong direction for a very long time, see the University Line Extension over building the DRL (now roughly the Ontario Line)—a line in the planning for what? 50 years? We'll happily shove more people onto transit while ignoring capacity issues, while capacity issues on roads and streets are tackled at the drop of a hat. We'll take what higher governments give us, because we have little power to do things on our own.