Transit was effective and efficient when those stations were built 40 years ago.

800m is not a short distance, that's almost a km. If you're talking about the stations on Bloor, 800m is a radius that stretches all the way up to Dupont.

The idea that you can only build transit networks near hyper dense neighbourhoods is simply untrue, and exactly the kind of short sighted thinking that caused us to underbuild transit in the first place.

Cities like Zurich or Newcastle have population levels of 200k - 300k and better subway and transit networks than Toronto.

The entire reason that Toronto is a pleasant livable city is because we have pleasant housing near transit, everyone rushing to tear that down rather than build more transit is racing to the bottom for corporate developer interests without realizing it.