The problem with 83 for busses isn't needing a dedicated lane, its the backups getting off the highway. Giving them a bus only lane on the highway doesn't do anything to fix that.

I am annoyed on the bus subject how much MD is trying to push electric busses when what we really need is that the colored line busses (and well, all the busses in general) having better than fucking 40 minute headways. I live on the purple line, they just cut the route from John Hopkins which really messed with me because it used to stop throughout downtown and at Shot Tower and now it skips half the city,

We need some express busses for arterials, particularly on rts 40 and 1. And we need way, way more frequent service on every line - 4-8 minute headways for colored lines, and 15 minute headways for numbered lines. People don't take the bus that could to get cars off the road because you can't get anywhere with a direct connection (and if you can, the bus stops 30 times and takes twice as long as driving anyway) and if you have to transfer you are stuck waiting somewhere for upwards of 20-30 minutes, and then half the time your transfer bus never even shows up.

I wish I could take the bus to doctors appointments, its like the perfect use case for busses, but I can't because I have to assume the bus will never show, get stuck in traffic, or that I'll miss the transfer. And even if it goes perfectly, most places I go regularly take 15-20 minutes by car and 40-120 minutes by bus. Make driving suck, and make taking transit not, and more people will take transit over driving, and then the city can build denser and waste less space on parking and roads for cars that drive people away.

Like, I am the person that hates driving and wants to use transit, but if I'm choosing between hopping in the car I park outside my townhouse with plenty of permit free street parking, have almost no traffic cuz the roads are so massive all the way out to some suburb sprawl mall with football fields worth of free parking in half the time it would take to bus anywhere, or possibly getting marooned somewhere with groceries when a bus just never shows or is 30 minutes out from when I'm done shopping, the system pushes you so hugely towards driving the planet killer.

Top it all off with most downtown jobs providing parking garages, so its not like you have to worry about parking for work, so of course you are going to drive there.