Bus Rapid Transit Feasible For Seattle

Here's a story from last week's P-I about what I think is the most promising method of public transit: bus rapid transit.

[Jaime Lerner,] former mayor of the Brazilian city of Curitiba — and an architect and international sustainability guru — is a champion of public transit systems that use buses in a different way.
...
Visiting Seattle this week, Lerner shared his impressions about how to tackle this city's traffic:

What is the difference between the way our buses in Seattle operate and your city's system?

"A system of bus rapid transit is not only dedicated lanes. You have to have really good boarding conditions — that means paying before entering the bus and boarding at the same level. And at the same time having a good schedule and frequency. We have a system where you don't have to wait more than one minute. That defines the quality."

Is there a way to create dedicated bus lanes in a cramped city like Seattle?

"There are many ways, many corridors where you can have a really good system. ... Sometimes you think, 'Aaah we don't have enough space.' ... There's always a good solution."

Bus rapid transit is fast, it's flexible (relative to fixed rail), and it's way stinking cheaper than light rails or monorails. The main problem with bus rapid transit—the reason it will most certainly never get off the ground in Seattle—is that it isn't romantic enough. It wouldn't look good enough on aspiring politicians' résumés. Perhaps from the ashes of the Seattle Monorail Project, we should raise up the Seattle BRT Project.

I'm an open-minded kind of guy though, so I'm willing to listen to you if you have a convincing argument about how useless BRT is and how much better trains are. So let's hear it.

(Jennifer Langston, Seattle P-I, 04.12.2006)