Some of the best things you can do to improve bus service are relatively small, and IndyGo has checked all these boxes with its Red Line. Level boarding without stairs reduces delays, especially when disabled people need to get on and off. So does letting passengers pay their fare in advance and get on and off the bus through any door. Light-rail-like boarding platforms with ticket vending machines, heating and protection from the elements improve the dignity of the bus experience.

Dedicated lanes are the gold standard for bus rapid transit. But even if you can't take that step right away, you can do the others. Give your buses the ability to pre-empt traffic signals and get a quick green light at major intersections, and implement the above steps that improve boarding efficiency, and you get much of the experience of rail at a tiny, tiny fraction of the cost.

Minneapolis-St. Paul's Metro Transit has embraced this approach with its aBRT ("arterial bus rapid transit") service, which is not true BRT—buses share the same street lanes with cars—but which feels a lot like riding BRT or even light rail in other respects. It's been a tremendous success, and is a model that cities can afford to repeat over and over and over. Transit expert Christof Spieler calls the first, flagship aBRT line "probably the best bus route in the US." And passengers love it, some even describing it in surveys as just as useful as light rail.

Precedent: Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota

3. Embrace the simplifying power of the grid.

One of the most under-appreciated things about true rapid transit in bigger, denser cities is its legibility. It's easier for a novice to navigate something that has a few lines that connect major destinations in relatively direct ways. Buses, on the other hand, tend to meander and follow counterintuitive routes. Ever had the experience in a strange city of being told to just hop on something called "the 14" or "the 72" and just trust that it will wind its way to where you want to be?

One answer to this is a grid of very frequent routes that run in nearly straight lines along major, known streets or corridors. Even if this means you have to transfer more often to move in a diagonal direction, you will only ever have to do so once, and frequency (every 15 minutes at a bare minimum, but under 10 is better) means it's relatively painless.

Red Line ridership in Indianapolis is underperforming expectations by a little so far, but this is likely due to two factors: one, it opened in the fall, and winter ridership is always lower. And two, there's the fact that the full grid of perpendicular feeder bus lines won't be implemented until next summer.

On Twitter, Strong Indy, a long-running local conversations group of Strong Towns members and supporters in the Indianapolis region, agreed with the work-in-progress analysis and urged patience: