I pretty much concur with potatolicious' assessment. I'd just like to add that it took some visionary thinking to get to where we are today. The city anticipated during WWII, that cars would be the preferred mode of transportation for many more people when the war ended. Instead of building just freeways, the city transit commission went to work planning public transit around rail. At first streetcars were to be used and would just run underground, but eventually the idea morphed into a fully fledged subway system.

That's not the only example of forward-thinking. There is a huge urban valley in Toronto called the Don Valley. In 1918, Toronto decided to build a bridge connecting roads on both sides of the valley and the designer figured "hey, why not build a lower deck capable of holding two lanes of rail traffic....just in case?" About half a century later, when the subway was being extended, they just ran the line through this bridge. In today's fiscal and political climate, a similar decision would never be made. In fact, I'm positive that 50 years from now, future Torontonians will look back at us with frustration at our shortsightedness. Funny thing about that bridge... it can hold 5 lanes of car traffic with sidewalks for pedestrians to boot. The designer successfully designed a bridge to last more than 100 years. It's an incredible accomplishment.

I just want to elaborate on my first post. Toronto's transit system's problems aren't all due to the union of course. They bare the brunt of criticism these days, but the truth of the matter is financial and political backing of the system at provincial and federal levels pretty much stopped happening at the beginning of the 1990s. The federal Liberal government was voted into power in the early 1990s at a time when Canada was dealing with its own financial crisis, not too dissimilar to what the U.S. is facing now. We had all these social programs financed on deficit spending. The Liberals slashed spending on a lot of programs, and Toronto's transit system was one of them. A few years after the Liberals got into power, the Progressive Conservatives were voted in at a provincial level and they also slashed spending. They "downloaded" some social programs onto cities which affected municipal budgets drastically. So basically, the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) has been cash strapped for the better part of 20 years now.

Things are so petty here that when our Prime Minister announced stimulus funding last year, he flat out rejected Toronto's request of money to build out the TTC infrastructure because it "didn't meet the criteria" (details here: http://www.blogto.com/city/2009/07/a_look_back_at_torontos_s...). Days after the rejection, our PM decided to fund a $790M mass transit system for a small university town an hour away from Toronto (one which he hopes to win votes in and probably will).

In any event, transit riders in Toronto are the ones getting screwed. It costs $3 for a one-way cash fare. The system is overcrowded. The infrastructure is getting old, although the TTC does a good job of keeping old workhorses running. You know those old GM "fishbowl" buses originally designed in 1959? We still have some of these clunkers operating on routes today (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:TTC_T6H_5307N_Bus_2284.jpg).

On my more cynical days, I'm of the opinion that Toronto eventually needs to threaten to secede from Ontario (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Province_of_Toronto) in order to ensure we get our proper share of the tax money so that we can spend it on things that matter to us like mass transit. The provincial and federal governments love to take our money and then not give much of it back when we truly need it.

I lived in Toronto for a while, and was a subway commuter:

- Built really early. There are a lot of cities that are just getting into the mass transit game, Toronto has been in it for 50 years, and this has allowed time for the culture to adjust, and for large housing complexes and shopping centres to develop around subway stations.

- Expansive, a lot of American cities start with small mass transit systems that don't run very far away from downtown. Toronto's advantage is that the two extreme ends of the subway line are very, very far from the downtown core, so subway commuting is a realistic option for people looking to live in cheaper neighbourhoods.

- Not reserved for poor neighbourhoods. In fact, the poorest areas of Toronto are entirely unserved by the subway system - the subway covers large swathes of lower middle class, middle, and upper-middle, and even upper-class neighbourhoods. This forced demographic has made the system in general much more welcoming as an option for people who would otherwise have the freedom to buy cars.

- Extreme density downtown. Once you leave downtown the distance between stations grows very dramatically, but in downtown there really is a station every 2-3 blocks, and you are never more than 5 minutes away from the subway. This type of convenience has encouraged an incredibly dense downtown (for Canada/USA anyhow) that is a destination.

- Discouragement of "multiple downtown" model. Here on the west coast we tend to develop smaller downtowns in multiple municipalities that are close together. Linking these by mass transit is difficult, and spreads your population thin. Toronto has a unique model in that the suburbs don't have as much of a "downtown", and all the hubbub and activity feeds into a very "mega-city" like downtown core by the lakeshore.

The reasons I commute by transit in Toronto (despite the very accurate drawbacks mentioned above - bring in smart-cards already!) are because it is faster and less expensive. Arguably Montreal's system is better on both counts. The people on the transit system here are the same people you see everywhere in the city.

One note: Toronto never ripped out its streetcar lines. I have always wondered why Toronto's streetcars were spared while most other cities in North America lost theirs.

Our transit system is very user-friendly because we have: - small headways – during rush-hour, there's a train every 180 seconds - good street network – widespread bus and streetcar network that are good for point to point, and also for feeding the subway network - one fare, doesn't matter how far you go or how many modes you use (subway, streetcar, bus)