Why do people prefer rail over bus? That's a pretty tricky question to untangle. It's largely emotional because consumer preference is not entirely rational, but it's also a question of investment -- many bus systems are poorly funded and so people's perceptions of buses suffers in comparison.
Could you build a high quality bus system that would move the needle in a similar way to a rail investment? Sure.
Could you do it cheaper than rail? Maybe.
But, would politicians be tempted to cheap out, cut lines, driver schedules, etc to save a buck? Absolutely.
And, would travellers view it in the same way they would view rail? No.
You'd be swimming upstream against consumer / traveller preferences which is almost always difficult. And regardless, I don't see any P3's stepping up with plans, feasibility studies, MOUs, and investment dollars to make a multi-billion dollar investment in a bus transit system.
Two seconds of googling here, but I found a study from a pair of researchers who looked into the question - Bus or Rail: An Approach to Explain the Psychological Rail Factor (2012). Here's the abstract.
Quote:
Many public transport studies have found that potential passengers consider railbased public transport to be superior to bus systems. Why is this? Two studies have been completed in Germany* and Switzerland in search of explanations for this socalled psychological rail factor. In this article, these two studies are presented and discussed to introduce the schemata approach and to help identify differences of attributions towards rail- and bus-based public transport.
The research found a psychological rail factor (i.e., a preference for using rail assuming equal service conditions) of 63 percent for regional train and 75 percent for trams compared to bus services. The rail factor is highly loaded with emotional and social attributions. They account for 20–50 percent of the share in the different schemata for bus, rail, and tram.
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https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdo...=rep1&type=pdf
* worth pointing out Germany has traditionally been a preferred market for Alberta's tourism agencies to attract international travellers so the German mindset shown in this dataset is particularly useful to understand.