Let's say you're a young family looking to buy your first house, and you want to live in-city, but it's soooo expensive. You scrimp and you save and you carefully budget, and you finally decided that you can afford your dream house, as long as you shave some expenses elsewhere. So you find a house conveniently located on a bus route, meaning you can save thousands of dollars a year by jettisoning your car(s), and after carefully running the numbers, you take the plunge. You may even pay a little premium for a house with a nearby bus stop.

One year later, Metro cancels your bus, leaving you stuck with a mortgage you can barely afford, but now with hundreds of dollars a month in additional car expenses.

Now, retell that story, but instead of a bus line, your family buys a house near a light rail station or a street car stop. Dollars to donuts, one year later, your transit options are still intact, as is the household budget that relies on them. Rail lines simply don't up and move in response to short term economic fluctuations, and it's this permanence that tends to up property values and attract development around them.

See, the difference between investing in rail and investing buses is that your rail investment actually leaves you with a capital asset, whereas bus service... well... it's kinda just an expense. Even the buses, paid for out of the capital budget, depreciate quickly. Essentially, there is no such thing as a bus system, except on paper, as many Metro bus riders may soon find out.

So as Seattle City Council members hem and haw and fret and worry over the additional capital costs of the high-capacity street rail recommendations Cienna reported on earlier today, they should keep in mind that bus vs rail is not an apples to apples comparison. The reason we might want to spend the extra money to invest in rail instead of buses, is that rail is an actual investment that pays dividends beyond just moving people. In fact, by raising property values and spurring development, it can partially pay for itself via increased tax revenues.

(Also important to remember: non-grade-separated "bus rapid transit" that runs in the same streets and traffic as all the other cars and buses, isn't bus rapid transit. It's just a BUS with the words "RAPID TRANSIT" painted on it.)