One of the most interesting stories in transportation over the last ten years has been the migration of a new form of public transit from South America, to Europe, to Canada, and finally to the United States. It goes by the name of Bus Rapid Transit. The idea is simply this: to run commuter-quality buses on surface dedicated bus-ways instead of building rail and tunneling underground, designing the bus-ways to approximate the speed, smoothness, and attractiveness of rail. This means getting buses out of traffic and into their own lanes, creating attractive "stations" instead of "bus stops," having people purchase tickets at the station instead of sticking dollar bills in as they board, making fewer stops along the routes, and giving the buses automatic signal preemption at intersections. (Here's an overview of how BRT works.) Los Angeles describes its new bus rapid transit system with the slogan, "fast, frequent, fabulous".

There are still places where surface rail or subways are worth the investment, but the promise of Bus Rapid Transit is that a city like San Francisco can establish a whole network of super-speedy transit that can get people anywhere they need, at a tiny fraction of the cost of building rail. Bus rapid transit is 50 to 80 percent less expensive to build than other options, such as light rail.

San Francisco is actually in the early stages of building this rapid transit network. The first, and perhaps most important, segment of the citywide Bus Rapid Transit network is the Geary line, which carries around 50,000 passengers each day, second only to BART for the number of people carried on any transit corridor in the Bay Area. It will cost about $200 million to build the Geary segment of the rapid transit network, a bargain price for the benefit to the city and the neighborhood. Not only does BRT make sense for Geary from a financial perspective, it also creates far less construction impact than comparable systems, such as light rail.

There are many examples from around the world of successful bus rapid transit systems. From Curitiba, Brazil to Eugene, Oregon, cities are making innovative use of BRT. The Go Geary Coalition is working to ensure that San Francisco gets the BRT system it needs to make transit in the city "fast, frequent and fabulous."