I'm a little behind, but the presentation for PAT's revised BRT plan is available:
http://portauthority.org/paac/portals/0/brt/webppt.pdf
This was 2017:
And now:
Basically they figured out it made more sense to use the 61ABC as BRT routes that continued to Downtown rather than the 61D, because people living along the outer parts of the 61D had much better Downtown alternatives.
On a personal note, they rejected an intermediary proposal that would have made my bus, the P71, a full day express bus, but I'll be interested to see if the upgraded 61A and 61B are competitive options to my area (Regent Square)--and probably better service to and through Oakland is more important to my area than additional express service to Downtown anyway.
There are also detailed PDFs of the lane designs available at the updated project website:
http://www.portauthority.org/paac/Co...jects/BRT.aspx
Here is Downtown, which would use a dedicated lane inbound along Fifth, then up Liberty to Sixth, then all the way around the bend on Sixth to Forbes outbound:
http://portauthority.org/paac/portal...wntownplot.pdf
Uptown--note the spaced out stations and bikelanes:
http://portauthority.org/paac/portal...uptownplot.pdf
And finally Oakland:
http://portauthority.org/paac/portal...aklandplot.pdf
It took me some zooming in to figure out the eastern end, but all that is pretty critical as it is where the 61s and 71B split off. Note that even though the dedicated lane ends on Forbes, you can still see upgraded stations at Forbes and Craig. That's consistent with the overall system map above, which shows the zone of "infrastructue improvements" extending all the way to Forbes and Murray and then down Murray to Loretta, and similarly all the way along the 71B route to Bunkerhill.
Which leads me to a final comment: there are still lots of people who will argue LRT is always better than BRT, or generally that train systems are always better than bus systems, and therefore that BRT is always just a cheap and inferior alternative.
But while that can be true in some cases, I don't think it is true in all cases. As I have pointed out before, the one very important thing you can do with BRT is you can have these local-to-express bus routes which share the dedicated lanes but then fan out to different areas, and all without needing transfers. Which is very important because transfers are ridership killers.
And that is exactly what played out with all this. People in the relevant neighborhoods complained about the need to transfer, and PAT was able to just lightly tweak their plan to address those complaints. That was only possible because this was a BRT project--if, say, this had been an LRT line from Downtown through Oakland, everyone riding a bus into Oakland from outlying areas would have to transfer to use it, and that would be that.
ETA: Apparently they also met with the FTA about the modifications and got positive feedback:
http://wesa.fm/post/fitzgerald-pat-c...-plan#stream/0
The federal budget recently passed has funding for these sorts of projects, so knock-on-wood it could get funded in the next round.