I live in Toronto, Canada, and have visited or lived in various large other cities such as New York, Chicago, Philly, LA, London, Paris, Montreal, Vancouver, Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong etc. And I am shocked by the lack of service in Toronto's rapid metro system.
First, with a city population of over 2.5 million (metro 5.1 million), Toronto has 2 complete subway lines (another two very short lines with a few stations only). It has a sheer 42 miles. Chicago with a similar population, has 107 miles. San Fran and DC both have over 100 miles as well. Toronto with 60% more people, ties with Philadephia.
Put distance aside, a monthly pass in Toronto is a whopping $121!
New York city, with 26 subway lines, charges $89; Chicago $86. Keep in mind that a typical job would pay about 20-30% lower in Canada compared with the US.
Now let's talk about technology. Apparently Torontonians still live in the 1980's. There is no such thing as a fare card where you swipe the card at the entrance and the fare for your trip is automatically deducted. You have to go to the machine, or ticket collectors (who are paid $50K+ by sitting there by the way) to buy something called "tokens", some antique sort of coins the civilized world has abandoned for decades. So basically unless you pay $121 for TTC's pathetic service each month, everyday you need to carry a bunch of dime-sized tokens to go around. If for some reason, you need to make one more trip than originally planned, God bless you, unless you are close to a subway station, or a store that sells tokens, you are stranded with your $20 bills in the wallet. You can't purchase day pass or weekly pass on the machine or online either. You would need to go to a ticket collector in person. A real person will actually scratches your day pass to show the validity date.
Having been to many big cities, I haven't seen a single city in the developed world, or even developing world, which charges such outrageous fares to its residents, offer such pathetic services, and use such outdated technologies.
By the way, the subway also breaks down regularly, and the bus is never on time (the bus schedule is completely meaningless). And the bus drivers feel it is reasonable to pull the bus over so that he can go to buy a coffee and keep 30 passengers waiting in the bus for 20 minutes.
How do you rate your public transit? I would give the TTC a score of 40 out of 100.