[rsynnott]

> We stop at 20 cars in 10 minutes because that's the equivalent of the bus.

I think you're underestimating the capacity of a bus system significantly. I live in Dublin, which is a city of about 1.5 million people, not super-dense, hardly the world's greatest metropolis. The double-decker buses used almost exclusively in the Dublin transport system hold 90 people (from time to time Dublin bus experiments with bendy buses, but they tend to get stuck on roundabouts). Let's say the average car holds 1.5 people (I think this is generous, it's probably closer to one, but let's go with it). So a bus is equiv to 60 cars.

I can think of a few streets nearby which have stops for ~20 bus routes, with other routes running through them but not stopping. Some will be every-20-minutes routes, but some will be closer to every-five-minutes at peak. At peak time, there will be multiple buses per minute on many streets. You will see buses queuing up behind each other to load and unload. There is _no way_ that the equiv capacity in cars could even _fit_ on the road, even if traffic wasn't a concern.

These, by the way, are normal bus routes, not BRT; that would be even worse.

Here's the practical equivalent of 240 cars embodied in buses (plus 272 in the tram): https://s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/prod-mh-ireland/607c5cf1-... - It's hard to see how you'd fit those cars in the equiv space. At peak times, all of those buses will be full.