As light rail nears in Norfolk, Virginia Beach begins to reconsider previous decisions to not participate

See "Beach council leans toward referendum on light rail" and from2008, "Righting a wrong on light rail" from the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot. The Hampton Roads Transit organization went ahead with planning and building light rail for Norfolk, figuring that as the system was being constructed, the kind of people who need to be able to kick tires in places like Virginia Beach would come around and begin to favor transit. Still, it's an expensive way to have to go about things.

This is an interesting comparison given the spirited discussion locally about whether or not to have light rail or bus rapid transit for the "Purple Line" transit system in Montgomery and Prince George's Counties in Maryland. This is an especially important decision because theoretically, the "Purple Line" idea (at least the first time I ever read about it as first expressed--I think--by Mark Jenkins in a Washington City Paper article around 1990) is supposed to be circumferential and connect at each end of each subway line.

Sierra Club image.

This means that ideally, this is the beginning of the Purple Line, not the end, and likely a light rail system would be far more likely to be used than bus services, unless those bus services were truly configured as bus rapid transit in the Curitiba manner, with dedicated busways, passing lanes at stops, and no sharing of laneways with other vehicles, and maybe with 80 foot articulated buses, although this length of bus isn't legal in the U.S. on public streets.

An 80 foot long Van Hool articulated bus.