This "light BRT" that the author suggests is just stripped-down BRT. If you do your BRT too light, it just becomes another bus with a different paint job. The cost control issues in North America keep getting in the way of great transit, where a line that should be a metro is light rail, a light rail line becomes BRT, and so on. As always, there is but one reason behind high transit construction costs:

The entire argument is "light rail is expensive." This is the most braindead argument possible. Light rail is only expensive because America demands every single aspect of every single thing be fully privatized. If the government builds the rail instead of contracting out wasteful for profit companies to build the rail, the problem of 'it is expensive ' goes away entirely. It just shows a lack of critical thinking when people say "we can't do it because expensive." The entire article is based on that entirely flawed premise. It is artificially expensive. Fix the root of the problem rather than trying to invent ridiculous solutions that try to work within the problem.

No light rail: heavy rail only. There should be a 750 km/h maglev HST that can take me between any two arbitrary points on the north american continent, and it should do it at no cost to me.

heavy rail it is then