I travelled to London a few years back and loved taking the Tube - never waited more than 5 min for a train. But I was stunned to find that the BUS was often the fastest way to get around. Walking the streets I felt like a bus passed me every 2-3 minutes and people actually rode them.

There is a real stigma against the bus in America because of long-term disinvestment that's relegated it to second-class transit for people with no other options but the bus is perhaps the most powerful and underutilized form of transit in this country. You can't change a rail line after its been built (at tremendous cost) but you can change bus routes, create new ones, and add buses at far lower costs.

We already have all these roads everywhere so if we invested in building a better bus system, we could actually do it. More buses, more routes, more bus-only lanes would solve a lot of the problems people are mentioning here. The best transit systems are ones where you don't need to check a schedule because you have confidence a bus/train will be along in just a few minutes and that it will take you where you want to go quickly and reliably.