Austin is growing very fast and in a surprisingly concentrated way for sunbelt standards. Almost all major development is downtown or in a few revitalized inner suburbs. I think a Canadian equivalent would be somewhere like Calgary, but if Calgary had never built light rail or done any transit at all.
The usefulness of a bus route is crippled when they have to drive in the same traffic congestion as cars. BRT requires widening streets or reducing car lanes and often both, which in the downtown area is difficult to do in both an engineering and a political sense. The places where transit needs to go in central Austin don't have existing corridors where you can have room for seperate right of way at grade. Look at the area around UT for example.
The purpose of LRT in Austin is to create a high-speed central spine. The rest of the network proposed will be BRT or enhanced local bus service on major streets to feed into it.
Current transit ridership is low because transit was simply never developed as it would have been in a historically larger city. Austin grew very fast, from only 200,000 people in the 1960s to almost 2 million today. In the middle of the 20th century when more people took transit, Austin was a small town. Capital Metro still runs a local bus system based on a 1990s paradigm when the city was small and downtown was tiny and the purpose of transit was just to give poor people and students a basic means of getting around only.
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Dallas made the mistake in investing in rail before buses, building the largest light rail system in the country, and it has worse transit ridership than Austin. It's only when it finally started investing in buses last year that now Dallas is finally seeing major ridership growth.
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I don't agree with this interpretation of events.
Dallas has a very regionalist mindset, IMO. It's metro area consists of several large, independent suburban cities which can be as influential as the core city. DART is a regional transit agency consisting of member cities and accountable to voters living in the suburbs.
DART has to split its funding priorities between a regional rail system in order to provide service to the voters whose taxes pay for the system AND local buses. It cannot do both things 100%.
This is often criticized, with many saying the DART should have focused on all resources on urban bus transit only. This is what Houston did. But Houston is a dominant, centralized city in a region where most of suburbs lack their own municipalities or have any elected officials of their own. So suburban tax dollars can be redistributed into the city while suburban taxpayers get effectively zero transit service beyond infrequent, peak hour one-direction park and ride buses that only serve a couple tens of thousands of people.
If DART did not provide service the suburbs wanted, it would have half as much funding as it has now. So the outcome would be exactly the same as now, there would only be so much resources for buses in the city. You can say this is bad, people in the suburbs shouldn't have transit and all money should be spent only on the core. But what's the fairness in this, to someone who lives in the suburbs who relies on transit, who pays sales taxes on stuff they buy.
An ideal scenario might be where Dallas has two transit agencies - DART for regional rail and commuter buses, and a new entity running urban bus and maybe metro or streetcar in the city core. But in Texas there's an upper limit on sales tax rates, so the agencies couldn't double up on revenue.