The Austin train you are talking about is heavy rail. Not to be confused with Austin light rail which is Coming Soon (TM).

It's still more reliable than the busses. I think it's pretty fun.

I'm not sure how you'd measure the effectiveness of light rail/trams vs buses - a hybrid of average journey duration, number of passengers, and I suppose some ROI type metric?

Either way personally priority bus lanes feel significantly more flexible and cheaper to implement than LR/trams...but that's just a personal opinion.