My pet conspiracy theory is that most bus routes are a false compromise sold to voters.
Good luck climbing hills. Not saying it wasn't done before (I use a "tram" which does it daily), but it's one of the more expensive problems to solve.
It's not an either/or thing. Buses are great (if they are well funded) and light rail is also great
The problem with buses is that most of the fleets are still running on fossil fuels. Buses also produce a shocking amount of waste in used tires. 
There is also another alternative: cable car. It's a good way to add public transportation with minimal impact on the existing road layout.
CityNerd posted a really good video on this topic a few months ago. https://youtu.be/H6UD9h3hEdk
His videos are primarily US-focused, but I believe this one applies for pretty much any country.
Depends on the road layout; if it's a long straight road then light railway makes sense. It's less maintenance, easier to operate, can move unhindered because it doesn't get stuck in traffic (edit: provided they don't share the roads).
For spaghetti road layouts though, I don't see the benefit, but I could be wrong since I'm no expert.
There is no reason rail has to be constrained to the road network. Eminent Domain is literally for things like this.
I was initially conceiving this point as a venn diagram, but I guess it works like this as well.
https://kbin.social/media/cache/resolve/post_thumb/80/cb/80cb7ac6546d3b6eba678e0e525cc69c60566b3dcdc2b088605dd72224c7f235.png
We need a whole host of public transit options that are best suited for each circumstance of a given area. I want public transit so smooth that even if you tried getting lost you end up where you wanted to go with no clue on how it happened. (last bit is an over exaggeration since i don't know how feasible that actually is lol)
Fuck Cars
This community exists as a sister community/copycat community to the r/fuckcars subreddit.
This community exists for the following reasons:
- to raise awareness around the dangers, inefficiencies and injustice that can come from car dependence.
- to allow a place to discuss and promote more healthy transport methods and ways of living.
You can find the Matrix chat room for this community here.
Rules
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Be nice to each other. Being aggressive or inflammatory towards other users will get you banned. Name calling or obvious trolling falls under that. Hate cars, hate the system, but not people. While some drivers definitely deserve some hate, most of them didn't choose car-centric life out of free will.
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