It depends a lot on the city, but in high-traffic areas, buses are extremely slow and unreliable because they have to fight through the traffic jams. Dedicated

It depends a lot on the city, but in high-traffic areas, buses are extremely slow and unreliable because they have to fight through the traffic jams. Dedicated bus lanes get around this, but it’s very hard to recapture the lane from car traffic at that point since the car drivers will see it as being taken from them. If you’re building a new rapid transit line with dedicated ROW, it then comes down to BRT vs LRT and the cost of BRT and LRT aren’t actually that different I believe. The buses are cheaper up front but the maintenance cost on light rail vehicles is supposedly cheaper (plus, they can use electric power and are cleaner than diesel buses). The article’s criticisms would apply equally to BRT though.