Have you been to Malvern? Sheppard is nice and wide and hardly all that traffic constrained most of the time. The buses are quite quick. They certainly above the 17 kph mark that's the TTC average. The only downside to the bus service on Sheppard East are bunching, service frequency and the traffic it encounters past Agincourt. I have a hard time seeing how LRT can improve significantly on all that. It'll solve bunching by reducing frequency. It won't solve frequency issues though. And it'll save a few minutes cutting through traffic...though it's doubtful if what'll save is worth nearly a billion bucks. And given that the implementation of LRT could see frequency reduced below that of today's bus service, I have a real concern that total travel time could go up.
I agree. One of the reasons I think Finch West would work very well as LRT is because Finch west is fairly wide, but it's congested at rush hour and can freeze up at other points of the day. The busses are already very popular on that route, and are almost at peak capacity, certainly in need of an improved service. Putting a LRT in place allows the transit vehicles to bypass the heavy traffic, and is the most logical way to improve capacity (I think that articulated busses would just be biding time, and might not be sufficient for increased passenger loads if a ROW is constructed.)
Finch East has about the same ridership as West, but from what I've seen, Finch East moves a fair bit faster than Finch West, which allows for more busses to operate on the route. That said, I think that Finch east is in desperate need of an improvement, and I think that articulated busses should be looked at, as well as bus lanes. Other than that, I wouldn't fix what aint broke; it's been popular because of the astoundingly high frequencies and close stops, and articulated busses and bus lanes would only make service better.
You're right, Sheppard only really gets slow and congested around Agincourt, generally west of Midland or Brimley. I'm not saying that LRT wouldn't give an improvement there, but a subway would give a substantially better improvement, and in terms of linking growth nodes and high density areas, Subway is vastly superior to LRT. As I said, this kind of LRT works well mainly as a feeder line to Subways and Regional Rail, not as a true Rapid Transit route.
Eglinton will only be successful because it's building a subway where there was none before. Comparisons to Sheppard East are misleading. We aren't going from bus to subway. We are going from a relative quick bus (east of Brimley anyway) to a less frequent and marginally faster at-grade streetcar.
Basically true. However, I think that Eglinton would be better if the subway portion was real subway, and the extra money just spent extending it to Jane and Don Mills. From the outside of those points, there is a pretty big roadway that doesn't get super-congested. It's the central portion that really gets Eglinton, and I think it'd be best to work on improving service there to the max, while the peripherals can continue to use bus until subway is deemed appropriate (demand for a route to the airport, demand for a better service, demand for connection to Kennedy, etc.)