Busses are a good transit solution, are cheap, and can more easily be modified than a train route can.

Trains good

It would only work for new development. No town or city would be able to change right-of-way enough for a special auto-car lane. It would require tons of money to go survey the land, buy the extra land/access, then build the extra lane. Only to have your town complain you've built an extra lane and won't let them use it. So that means these special roads need to be planned which means new roads only. Not saying it would be more expensive than trains, just that this is a really bad solution. It's just a tech demo to get investors. And investors won't know enough about how urban planning works to see the issue. They do think that you can just get the DOT to throw down some extra lanes everywhere. It looks like the tech demo is just in a specific office park right around the company that runs it. It's much easier to get some extra lanes put around a business park that was probably designed with future bus access in mind than it is to do this in the wild.

And just to keep ranting about this hit further, god only knows what kind of unholy alliance would have to take place between big tech and DOT for this to happen everywhere. Basically the DOT would be saddled with doing all the work of building the roads and maintaining them while the company would likely own the newly built lanes. So they're definitely trying to do the libertarian paradise of roads being privately owned. The owners would be Uber, Lyft, This shit, etc. Then eventually those companies grow and merge and become a private DOT.

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