Bus Rapid Transit is neat but you don't need it to create a reliable public transit system. A smattering of American cities have had reliable and popular public transit system (Portland in the late 90s I recall). The problem is that good transit system get gutted whenever a city runs a deficit and so public transit converges to its stereotype - a slow moving, irregular single line filled with those not having a choice about riding it.

If you go back further, 80-100 years ago every American city / town had functional public transit systems. The wide median strips on a couple of boulevards in my mother's hometown recall the street-car lines that she rembered seeing torn out in the 1950s. When she and my dad moved back there about ~15 years ago, after they'd retired, they voted against the in-fill development and public transit initiatives proposed by an urbanist mayor, because "[town's] too small for that".

> you don't need [BRT] to create a reliable public transit system

No one made this claim.