Orphan Road

The Switchback looks at the current effort to build Bus Rapid Transit in Boston:
"If the Silver Line were a rail project - as basically every public-transit using citizen would prefer it - the MBTA could simply reactivate the rail tunnel leading from Boylston Station down Tremont to the Church of All Nations, and build a portal at Eliot Norton Park. There are already platforms for it at Boylston Station. That would make most of the tunnel work unnecessary.

The current plan calls for the state to spend several hundred million dollars of taxpayer money to dig a new tunnel down Boylston, then down Charles…to the Church of All Nations site at Eliot Norton Park."

And at Seattle Transit Blog a commenter looks at fast buses in Seattle:
"During the campaign, it was emphasized that buses could be brought online in terms of months, not years (a dig at light rail construction times). So, the measure passes, and we find out that RapidRide won’t see the light of day in Ballard or on Aurora until 2013. That’s seven years out from 2006."

What do these items have in common? That's right- BRT is neither cheaper nor faster to build. No matter what you might say about a mixed system or buses needed as feeders or matching the traffic requirements with the market, at the end of the day, BRT is most likely to be a fraud.

I'll let other people be "reasonable" and concede that, if you grant a lot of things that never will happen, BRT "might" work. When I look around at all these existing BRT implementations and find delay, financial ruin, and angry riders, I've had enough. BRT is a fraud.