WordPress somehow deleted my entire post except the intro and maps in a revision, and it’s not recoverable; I will reconstruct the rest of the post tomorrow 7-30.

Bus grids in North American cities are easy for planners and riders to understand, and help avoid excessive detours. Nearly all American and Canadian cities have gridded streets, often stretching over the entire city and even its suburbs, which makes it easy to run buses this way. Because some large cities, like Chicago and Toronto, have such extensive bus grids, some planners and activists believe that the bus grid itself works well at this scale, and try to apply it elsewhere, like Los Angeles. But in fact, the scale of buses is rather short, and in a Los Angeles-size city they are hopeless, no matter how much priority they have. Bus-rail connections are good and Chicago and Toronto rely on them, but the rail must come first; the buses cannot be viewed as the primary backbone that the rail builds up on, but can only exist as rail feeders.