[bobthepanda]

The problem is that moonshots do not work for solving bread and butter problems, and generally speaking you need to do lots of legwork before a metro area is ready for such things. The poster child I like to use for this is San Jose VTA, which has not a lot to show for its large light rail network despite being the home to Silicon Valley, but similar stories can be told in most major US metropolitan areas.

The odd one out in terms of public transportation in the last two decades is Seattle. Seattle is now investing tens of billions of dollars to extend the tentacles of its light rail throughout the region, eventually to 116 miles. But before this has even been completed, the metro area is one of the only non-NYC metros to have recorded consistently positive transit ridership growth in total, and probably the only one that had an actual percentage growth in mode share too, all with a rapidly expanding population.

This has mostly occurred via the normal, no-frills bus. The vast majority of bus routes do not have lanes or traffic priority or separation, but the very important thing is that frequency was massively increased; 70% of Seattle households are a ten minute walk from very frequent transit in 2019, up from 25%. [1] It turns out that if bus services are actually convenient, and driving is a pain in the ass, people will switch to transit to save themselves the frustration of having to actually pay attention to maddening road congestion. In addition land use in Seattle has long been focused on smart growth, with growth being funneled into dense regional nodes and highway buses being set up to link them on an hourly or half-hourly basis.

[1] https://seattletransitblog.com/2019/10/30/seattle-tbd-annual...