I'm saying that the two types are uncomparable. What Marlborough Station represents is what LRT looks like when you prioritize getting around quickly. I'm sorry but Public Realm should NEVER be an absolute priority. Function over form any day of the week. Also I'm not arguing we should replicate Marlborough Station, I'm not even saying we should have the C-Train. My point of comparison of the C-Train is that that is LRT done right. My argument for Eglinton is that it shouldn't be LRT AT ALL - but a light metro.
Okay? And we could've had something even better for cheaper
You need it if you want EFFECTIVE TSP, and you want trains to run at efficient speeds.
Nobody is arguing that the status quo should've been maintained.
500m is WAY TOO LITTLE. They should be every km or so.
However the option to travel that distance should always be there. When we design a regional network, we shouldn't design it for "the biggest use case", we should design it with as many use cases in mind. We should design it to allow people to commute, but also to allow people to travel from one end to another as quickly as possible.
There will also likely be many people using it commute from Scarborough to say Pearson Airport. Maybe they need to visit someone who lives in Mississauga. The use cases you're arguing for makes it seem like you want to build transit for commuters. That's great and all, but that means that people still need cars to effectively do anything other than commuting.
And the reason for this is because Line 2 has extremely tight stop spacing - too tight. On average, there's a station every 600m on Line 2 which significantly increases end to end travel time. Eglinton on the other hand has a subway section with reasonable station spacing - around every km, and an extremely packed surface section. If the underground section of Line 5 had the same stop spacing as Line 2, the average speed would've been like 25km/h or even lower. This statistic doesn't reflect Line 5 well, as much as it poorly reflects on Line 2's design.
Don't forget though that Scarborough is MASSIVE, and trips within Scarborough are extremely large in their own right - with many trips and commutes exceeding 10km.
If you build the line as a fully grade separate light metro with smaller trains, you already get massive time saving on accounts that the train will arrive much more frequently. Being generous, let's say a train would arrive every 3 mins, that's a theoretical time save of 4 mins right off the bat.
If you're getting on at Warden, well we can do that math. Let's be generous and say we have somewhat functioning TSP and you spend an average of 10s per traffic light. We'll remove Hakimi-Lebovic and Aga Khan Stations because those stations are too close to other stations (and honestly have no reason to exist), and we'll remove 5s per station since High Floor trains typically result. We'll consider the average station dwell time at around 45s for the light metro, and 50s for LRT.
Excluding Warden I counted 9 surface crossings.
that's 10*9s + 8*5s + 2*45s, or 90s+40s+90s which gives us 220s of travel time improvement or 3m 40s, and this is generous. In reality, we won't have TSP that is this good, and a fully elevated Light Metro will have trains that operate at much higher speeds than the LRT, and of course this doesn't factor in how much time you will likely save not waiting for a train. Sure the station is on street level and quicker to access, but A) since you have to cross Eglinton, you are at the mercy of the current pedestrian crossing signal, which means you might have to wait up to a minute before you can cross the street (this is an aspect people seem to conveniently forget), and even if we assume that you can always cross Eglinton freely, climbing up to an elevated station only takes a minute max, so the time savings of easier access to stations isn't even that much to begin with. Not enough to compensate for everything else.
