I used to love the TTC and brag about it to people back home. No joke!
Now that I have lived with our transit system for six years, it is easy to complain. Some trips are good, others not so much. Delays and overcrowding are almost always the culprits.
Back in the day the TTC was probably an excellent system. It just has not grown along with the city--which is not strictly the fault of the TTC as much as the three levels of government that can dole out the big bucks for the big projects.
And as mentioned, no redundancy has been added to the system: if a streetcar or subway line goes down, you usually have no good alternatives.
(I will resist the urge to complain here about how the combination of the city, Metrolinx, the province and the feds seems to ensure that nothing ever gets beyond the planning stage Toronto/GTA needs to be its own city state.)
So while the city has grown denser and denser, additional subways have not been added other than the little used Sheppard line that only brings more people onto the super packed Yonge, University, and Bloor-Danforth lines. The Yonge-Bloor station is surely one of the best examples. There is no way the lower platform for the east-west line was meant for that many people. It always surprising to me that not more people have fallen off that narrow walkway has it gets full of people waiting for the subway.
I'm optimistic that a downtown relief line will eventually be built but suspect that I'll be better off just moving to within a walk to work.