I'm not knocking their transit. I'm sure it's great. But you can have good transit, zoning, and affordable housing. See Berlin.
And, yes, Berlin has it's problems, and I'm sure somewhere else is doing things even better. I'm just curious why Zurich is a model we should look to.
Many of my colleagues were living outside Zurich in smaller towns / villages (me too), and we could get to work in 20 minutes, which was for me great actually, I loved sitting on the train and enjoying the beautiful view.
If you drove that during rush hour, you wouldn't be travelling at max speed the whole time, and likely would also take two hours to travel, potentially more (Google predicts up to 2 hours and 40 minutes).
Step 2: compare to alternatives, factoring in geography, culture, scale of operations, political environment
It's a hugely complex issue. I wouldn't define Toronto's public transit as bad, but it's not world class.
The train takes 2 hours to travel 100km. Cars can do that distance in one hour, despite having to cope with traffic. That's pretty appalling. Good public transit should be faster than a car along its main corridor.
Apart from geography, those other factors are reasons, not excuses. Lots of people here look down on public transit and associate it with poor people. That's a problem to be rectified.
And if it only were so easy!
Toronto, and Canada, is very much like the US in terms of its reliance on the car to get around. Except in urban centers, and NYC, the first choice of transportation is almost always the car. This is not just a mindset. The lack of a proper transportation infrastructure and the sprawling nature of North American cities make it difficult to get around without a car.
In fact, I would say urban sprawl and traffic are worse in Toronto than in most American cities (I'm originally from Toronto and I've lived in the US for more than two decades). And what about the surrounding regions, like York and Peel regions? I would say the prospects for an adequate public transportation infrastructure in the surrounding regions of Toronto are even worse, and the population in the surrounding suburbs rivals the population of Toronto proper.
In Zurich I can get from any place to any other place easily because the tram/bus/train connections are always waiting for each other, and are almost never too early / late.
People can use cars if they need it, but it shouldn't be the first choice generally.