Being dead has given me a lot of times to have crazy drug induced dreams about Starbucks and public transit and Dark Age of Camelot and Harvest Moon games. Separately, not together, or else it would be one cracked out dream. I've also been reading a lot of blog posts. One of which happened to be about how Seattle launched a test of its new multi-county LRT system to complement its commuter rail line. (Fun fact: they use the same bi-level cars developed for GO Trains)
I've always wondered why GO Transit never considered upgrading some of its busier bus routes to LRT instead of to a busway. (Information on the busway can be found here at Spacing's Wire.) Again and again all we hear about is the upper bound that bus routes have for capacity.
Sound Transit, which serves the area around Seattle (and the Sound, I assume), is currently building a long LRT line to complement the expansion of it's commuter train line the Sounder.
Image courtesy of Sound Transit until I have server access again.
Information on the first section to open in 2009 can be found here, along with an image of the LRT cars being used. They look to be about the length of a ALRV downtown. (Adam, that means the bendy ones).
While anything is better than sticking buses in traffic, the busway is going to be along the 403/401 for the most part, which doesn't do much good for moving people around a city. It's only good at moving people through it. I don't know much about the actual schematics for building an LRT vs a LRTs do a lot better in tunnels than buses do, are most aesthetically pleasing, and generally have better pull on commuters than buses. Might be something worth looking into.
