I agree with you, active commuting would be the best way to go.  We need to deal with the reality of very large cities with inadequate transit. Walking or taking a bicycle to work is simply not practical for many of us given the distances we travel to work.  We need to build convenient and fast transit to enable and encourage people to leave their cars at home.  

We also need to provide incentives for spreading the jobs around the city so people would not have to travel so far to go to work.  We simply cannot all fit into downtown and many of us don't want to live there.  Concentrating jobs in a small area in a city like Toronto which is 40 km across and 20 km down to the lake from its borders is poor planning.   The other reality is that there are two job nodes in the GTA with very poor transit, the Malton Airport area and Markham.   The DVP is almost as busy heading north in the mornings as it is heading south.