Thanks again everyone. I think I have a clearer idea about this now, though I agree that it might have a hard time getting buy-in. At this point, it sounds like there may be some resistance to the traditional configuration due to a variety of concerns - signal timing, intersection geometry, among other things.
I was able to pin down the one modern example of this that serves as a precedent, though it is actually
in Sweden.
My personal thought is that American driver culture isn't nearly law-abiding enough for this to work, and cars would probably end up in all kinds of unexpected places in the "Bus Only" lane. It reminds me a bit of the double-white stripes separating the express lanes from the regular lanes on US36, and anyone who drives on there can see how well people respect that rule. Northern Europeans have a sort of natural respect for rules and order, whereas I get the sense that Americans believe these rules are meant to be broken. If they didn't want people entering and exiting the lanes in-between the intended merge sections, they should have built a wall. The fact that there are signs everywhere saying "do not cross solid white stripes" should indicate that the design was broken from the beginning (on a side note, I certainly hope CDOT doesn't have the hubris to try this ridiculous design again on the new I-70).
As I said before, this is still in a blue-sky discussion phase, so it wouldn't be appropriate of me to name names while nothing concrete has been advocated for yet. I'd be happy to keep everyone posted once there are some concrete alternatives on the table that have been made public.
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