Montreal is similar. Parking downtown: horrible. Parking out in the 'burbs and then riding the metro into town? easy, and lovely. For a lot of things, anyway.
It’s a pretty good solution for medium-sized cities, but it breaks down as population increases. Toronto has largely stopped building these garages because they’ve run out of room for them after immense population and ridership growth.
Toronto is a pretty big though, so it’s still a solution worth exploring for medium-sized cities that can still reasonably build these facilities.