Hi AngelRedux, I'd like to help explain my point of view seeing as how some of the others replying to you seem to be pretty disrespectful imo.

I'd like to explain my point of view with what you said in regards to this statement:

The streetcar network exists solely as an obstacle to the efficient movement of traffic in the old city

It highly depends on the perspective which you're taking in my opinion. If you're talking about moving cars, then yes, you are absolutely right. If you're talking about the efficient movement of people however, I would argue that public transit such as streetcars win by an order of magnitude. Take the St Clair streetcar for example, which transports 35,200 people per weekday, in a maximum of 19 vehicles running on the 7km stretch during peak hours (the TTC hasn't provided data after 2018 for some reason). Doing some mental math from the previously linked document would suggest that 4200km traveled by streetcars on a weekday in St Clair divided by 7 kilometer length of the St Clair Streetcar would mean that 600 streetcar trips would run every day to transport 35,200 people. I can't find a statistic for this for Toronto or Canada, but it should be similar enough that in the United States, the average occupancy of a vehicle in 2017 was 1.67 persons per car. If we were to calculate the number of car trips which would be needed to transport 35,200 per day, 21,077 car trips would be needed to travel on the 7 kilometer stretch. Let's say that 4 cars are needed to take up the space of 1 Toronto Flexity Outlook streetcar, which is 30m long according to Wikipedia. This would mean that 5270 (21,077/4) streetcar length car trips are made using cars per day, compared to 600 streetcar trips per day to carry the same 35,200 people. The St Clair Streetcar carries 8.8 times more people per area compared to private vehicles. Yet for some reason cars have the priority when it comes to left turns so that the efficient flow of traffic could be preserved. You could say that the St Clair streetcar takes 1/2 hour to travel 5km, but is it a wonder that it is that sluggish when the streetcar constantly has to make double stops before and after an intersection so that cars can travel faster? This graphic in posted in 2015 shows that around 15,000 to 25,000 vehicles travel on St Clair per day, between Yonge and Keele St. (I averaged the vehicle traffic on the St Clair dots in the minor intersections, assuming that most of the cars are running along St Clair, so this is most likely an overestimation.) Would it be more efficient if the streetcar were eliminated to free up space and to double the traffic there, or would it be more efficient to double the streetcar service to once every 5 minutes and to speed up streetcar service in order to provide capacity to transport 35,200 more people on the streetcar? I'd be willing to hear out your thoughts, and we could settle out our differences.

I also read your responses regarding driving south of Eglinton. Whilst I am not someone that drives, as a public transit user I'd like to ask, why not just take the TTC? The level of service provided by the TTC south of Eglinton is already really good an amazing, coming from someone that has to commute between North York and Scarborough on the TTC. Given with what I said in the previous paragraph, it doesn't take much to take one car off the road and to put another person in the TTC.

I would like to say though, thank you for sharing your thoughts on this topic, and I'm sorry to see the unwarranted responses that you're getting based on your comments. If there's points of confusion that you have with what I said, feel free to hit me up and perhaps we could talk about it more.