This was a recommendation by the staff of the county planning board. The planning board itself will vote later – their public hearing is Monday. The planning board itself is only advisory to the county council. The county council, in turn, is only advisory to the state. The state will make the decision.

There is lots of political support for light rail.

A couple of other amplifications. There is one additional light rail corridor under study in Maryland, from Branch Avenue to Waldorf. And in Maryland’s transportation trust fund, all state money is completely flexible between modes – meaning there is even less excuse for spending $4 billion on highway widening and yet being unwilling to invest $200 million extra to get light rail in the same corridor.

Are you talking about typical North American “BRT-lite,” which I’d define as “bits of exclusive right of way where it’s easy, but not where it’s needed, plus lots of non-preempted signals”? Or are we talking high-end truly exclusive BRT like, say Brisbane (see http://www.humantransit.org/brisbane/ ) ?

High-end BRT really can match the speed and reliability of rail transit because it’s built to the same standard. Unfortunately, there’s no good example of it in the US, which is part of why American transit advocates have a jaundiced view of BRT. But we who write about this have a duty to be clear about what’s been achieved overseas.

As many commenters have noted, BRT-lite is watering-down of the concept generated, in part, by Bush-era federal funding policy, which made any brightly painted bus more fundable if you called it BRT. But fully exclusive BRT, such as what Alan Hoffman advocates and what we have in Brisbane, really is rapid transit, and that needs to be pointed out.

The question arises because you’re talking about a freeway corridor, and those often do lend themselves to a high-end right-of-way, though as you note they’re often not central to older town centres.

This is a silly question, because, as you mention, they already live there. So adding transit allows them to live better. And someday, maybe their neighborhoods will become walkable urban places because of their access to transit.

And the point isn’t WHERE people live, but HOW they live. Outside of land that is particularly vulnerable, they could live wherever they want to for all I care, so long as the form of the development is good – access to transit, walkable, etc.