Like holy fuck are they efficient.
These transport about the same number of people each day.
I don't even have to guess at which is cheaper to maintain. Like the amount of economic value is lost to the automotive industry is staggering.
i guesstimated the original sale value of just the number of cars in one mall parking lot (out of three main parking zones around the mall) and i don't remember the exact numbers, but doing some napkin math:
the average new car sale price in ontario is about $66k (assume this more or less tracks inflation so the real value in terms of purchasing power is more or less consistent, long term)
estimating the current year transit budget at around $59M, this means it would take just shy of 900 cars to fund the city's entire transit system for a year
there are approx 3500 spots in the mall lot, so to put that in a different context, it's the original sale value of enough cars to fill just one third of this lot's capacity, just at that particular instant in time, on that one particular day i happened to be passing by there
transit only appears expensive because it appears as a single lump sum, and we compare that number to the (still individually expensive!) cost of an individual personal vehicle, but never consider the systematic cost of those things in aggregate