Yep I'd agree.
I think the reason Skytrain comes up is because Skytrain is largely the scale that is needed in Toronto as well at least on lesser used lines.
Skytrain stations are usually pretty minimal, all of them are fully accessible but, no mezzanines or anything like that, not really any tiling either, very functional.
Likewise the Skytrain rolling stock is significantly smaller than the Toronto Subway stock but that means you can easily do single bore tunnels (ala Evergreen Line) and build guideways in the center of even moderately wide roads.
Bear in mind that to bore at 6 metre tunnel vs. a 7 is barely a saving. If you bore, bore large enough to accommodate upgrade later. Toronto always plans for yesterday it seems. So why do small bores and then be shid out of luck when the demand shows up later? It costs barely any more to bore a 6m tunnel vs a 6.5 m tunnel, or a 7m one if you want to accommodate LRT in the initial and perhaps later incantation?
The greatest impact engineering wise for a larger bore isn't cost, it's minimal radius for bends. (plus carriage length, shape and placement of the bogies)
Consider what Crossrail is to do with a 6.5m bore:
250M passengers per year. Crossrail has put in 12 car platforms, but will start with 9-10 car trains. Why looking so far forward? Crossrail head engineer: (gist) "Because once you've bored a tunnel that deep for a platform, it's a hundred times more difficult to extend it later".
Keep in mind:
[...]
More pertinent to our discussion, London has seen a surge in public transport use. Some of this could be explained away by other factors but the surge in core journeys to and from work by all forms of transport – public and private – has consistently defied any really plausible explanation other than that there were more people around. A notable feature of recent years has been a huge rise in public transport usage – notably on London Overground but also on Tramlink and other services. This was partly put down to a “
improve the quality of service and the passengers will come” belief but even so the reality appears more and more to be that there is a latent demand that will seize any opportunity for new and better connections. It is very noticeable that much trumpeted improvements on the Underground, such as greater frequency of trains in the peak period, lead only to a very short term improvement before trains quickly fill up and the Tube remains just as crowded as before.
At many underground stations one is lucky to be able to board the
third train that comes along in the peak period. From that it would seem clear that the latent demand is considerable but people are put off by the difficulty in making their journey. On that basis we are nowhere near to providing adequate transport services for a city that is so utterly dependent on public transport in its central area. The perception is that the Underground is just getting busier and busier. This perception is backed up by figures in the
latest commissioner’s report which states:
A new non-Olympics daily record was set on Friday 6 December [2013] with 4.53 million [Underground] journeys made, which is only 14,000 fewer than the record set during the Games.
So, by the time you read this the Underground may already be at is busiest ever and roughly 50% up on the figure of 3 million a day which was generally quoted for much of the late 20th century.
One of the frustrations for commuters is that they can see there is a problem today and they are savvy enough to realise that providing 12-car trains instead of 10-car on the National Rail network, increasing Thameslink from 16tph to 24tph (but a lot of them still 8-car) in the core section or upping the frequency on the Underground lines by a few tph are not going to solve the problems. All they do is buy us time. One can almost envisage Neville Chamberlain waving around his tablet computer showing the
Tube Improvement Plan and reassuring us that all is well.
[...]
https://www.londonreconnections.com/2014/happens-crossrail-full-part-1-problem/
Sound familiar? Six car subway trains on the Relief Line are not going to 'cut it' when the line is extended north at both ends. The need is to *bypass* the present subway, not bolster it.
Building the Relief Line as a conventional subway is to live in the past, and piss through a straw for the future.
As that pertains to 'Skylink' or 'REM' shorter trains, unless you're able to lengthen them considerably in the future (and thus longer platforms) you could run them every 60 seconds, and still not have the capacity necessary to "relieve" the subway.
Metro vehicles, yes, but of sufficient length, frequency and capacity. Already REM is predicted to come up well short of replacing the capacity at peak for the EXO (ATM) trains on the Deux Montagnes line through the Mount Royal Tunnel.
Here's how Sydney is doing it, with virtually the same trains as REM:
There will be three doors per side per carriage and no internal doors between the carriages. In a 6-car configuration the trains will sit 378 people, with a total capacity of 1,100. Seating arrangements on the Alstom trains will be longitudinal, in accordance with the style of most other metro trains.
Sydney Metro - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Metro
Consider this: Build it to use two or three car RER EMUs to start, and then extend it up to a maximum length later (8 or so cars, the beauty of modern EMUs is you can couple and uncouple them in less than a minute) Stations can be built to that length (8 cars or so), but initially the platform be only finished for the distance needed, extended along the pre-built allowance later, like many cities already do. It's not rocket science. And yet again, the new 'standard' for vehicles outside of the TTC becomes universal and inter-operable. Other cities do it...why does Toronto have such an incredible mind block on doing what's proven elsewhere?
I don't see many....in fact, no...other cities looking to copy the TTC gauge. Why do you think that might be? It does keep invaders from commuting into the core...
Seriously though, as recently as thirty years ago, Toronto was a study in efficient transit. It's gone downhill since then...it's become a study of what not to do.
